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[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN BROWN: As director of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences,
I am pleased to welcome you to the annual Sustaining our World lecture presented by
the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences in ecology and environment. This is our largest
and most public lecture in SEFS and offers us the opportunity to showcase work that advances
our mission of generating and disseminating knowledge for the stewardship of natural and
managed environments and the sustainable use of their products and services.
We look for presenters for this lecture whose work exemplifies the links between science
and practice in the service of sustainability. We've had a wide range of topics ranging from
wildlife conservation to forest fires and building tall with wood and human nature connections.
You may see the video cameras around the room. That means that tonight's lecture is being
recorded. And if you want to share with your friends, go back and rewatch it, or check
some of our past lectures, they'll be on our website. I want to acknowledge the generous
support of the Byron and Alice Lockwood foundation which made this evening's lecture possible.
And I am most honored and thrilled that Jon Foley has agreed to serve as the first Sustaining
our World lecturer during my term as the director of SEFS. Jon is the executive director of
the California Academy of Sciences. I've known Jon's work for a number of years, starting
at the University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota from there. And he's made a number
of major contributions to our understanding of changes in global ecosystems, land use
and climate, and global food security.
His work has inspired my own for a number of years, not that we're old or anything.
He has thought big and brought rigorous scientific thinking to really challenging and thorny
problems. Simply, Jon's work focuses on the sustainability of our planet and the ecosystems
and natural resources on which we depend-- small order.
A key focus of his work has been on society's use and production of food, water, and energy
and how that affects species extinctions, resource depletion, freshwater decline, and
climate change. He's won numerous awards, including Presidential Early Career Award
for Scientists and Engineers, J. S. McDonnell Foundation's 21st Century Science Award, a
Leopold Leadership Fellowship, a Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society
of America, and in 2014, he was named winner of the prestigious Heinz Award for the Environment.
As executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, Jon oversees that institution's
programs of scientific research, education, and public engagement. He's one of the most
effective science communicators I know and has written many popular articles, op-eds,
and essays in publications like the National Geographic, Scientific American, and New York
Times, The Guardian, and many others.
I'll be talking tonight about his newest initiative, Planet Vision, which inspires us to work together
to look to science and nature for guidance to find a new way forward. We're hoping you
leave here tonight evermore inspired to work with communities, businesses, governments,
and individuals to put these world changing ideas into action. It is with great pleasure
that I present to you the 2018 Sustaining our World lecturer, Dr. Jonathan Foley
[APPLAUSE]
JONATHAN FOLEY: Thank you very much for having me here today, and it's really a pleasure
to be in Seattle again. It's just such a great place-- and visiting the UW and seeing all
the magnificent work going on here. I have the pleasure today of meeting a number of
students and faculty and folks here at the University, and I hope to talk to a lot of
you after this talk tonight too about the work you're doing here. But it's just truly
inspiring and really great to be here.
As Dan was saying, we're going to be speaking tonight-- and this whole lecture series is
really focusing on sustainability. And here we are in a school devoted to the environment,
to forest ecology, and to the environment writ large here at the University of Washington.
So you may think-- and given my background as a scientist-- that I'm going to be talking
about science and technology or maybe policy and that kind of thing.
But actually, I've come around the last couple of years to think that the sustainability
challenge we face most of all is really one to deal with our own history as a people and
as a species and our culture. So I really want to start with that. One of the things
that's so bizarre and interesting about our time on this planet is how different it is
from any other time something like humans have walked the earth.
Something like us-- something that would eventually become a human being, early hominids, and,
even before that-- have walked this planet for, I don't know, 6 million years or so they
tell us. Do the math. That's 300,000 generations of something like us who walked and lived
and died on this planet.
And one fact was undeniably true during that entire time-- Earth was big, we were small.
But that suddenly flipped around and changed entirely in just the last two or so human
generations compared to the 300,000 before us. So what happened? We suddenly felt that
the Earth got suddenly very, very small, and we-- our species, our civilization-- got very
large indeed.
Why did that happen? Well, a couple of reasons. One, of course, is there is a lot more of
us on the planet today than ever before. This is just a graph showing human population over
time. For most of our existence, we were just in the maybe 100 million or less range. We
broke the half billion mark in the 15th century, the billion mark in the 18th century, 2 billion
in early 20th century, and then we suddenly rocket to over 7 billion today. 7.4 is the
current number of billions of people on Earth.
The good news is we're slowing down dramatically our population growth, and we will stabilize
population. It can't grow indefinitely. And we'll see stabilization somewhere in the range
of 8, 9, or 10 billion probably. I think nine, but others will give you a different number.
We'll see, but the good news is it's slowing down faster than we anticipated. That's good,
but it happened right after the largest growth in human numbers this planet has ever, ever
experienced.
But even more than just the number of humans on the planet, of course, is what we're doing
as a species-- how skilled we are at using technology, using our resources in transforming
our planet. This weird picture I just showed over here-- and I'm sorry the projector has
kind of shifted the image a little to the left. Maybe they can play with that a little.
But what we see here is that we can see the nighttime lights of our cities. I like this.
This is good. Here we go. They are literally moving the Earth for us. This is really cool.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
What we see here is the nighttime lights of planet Earth at night. We can look down from
satellites and see our cities, even our fishing fleets or oil fields-- anything that uses
technology and creates light, we see it. And I don't have to draw boundaries and put names
on this map to show you, hey, there's India. There's Taiwan, and there's China. There's
Japan.
There's South Korea. There's not North Korea right there. Well, that's Kim's house-- the
one with the light on. Isn't that striking-- the big difference between South and North
Korea here? You can even see it from outer space.
That's kind of amazing. So here we see the massive increase in human numbers, but even
more importantly is the increase in our technological prowess and our ability to change the planet
at a global scale. This is also very new.
So one of the things I really want to point out is that our species' growth and our success
has put enormous pressures on this planet, and a lot of it's happened very recently.
If we just look at the last 50 years or so, we see incredible changes. Just in 50 years,
the world population more than doubled. In just 50 years, the economy grew over eight
and 1/2 fold during the same time-- so twice as many people doing more than eight times
more stuff.
We use three times more food, about twice as much water, and about three and 1/2 times
more energy in fossil fuels than we did just 50 years ago. The astonishing thing about
this is not only did we change more than any other period in history, we changed more in
two generations than the entire sum of human evolution and all civilizations' histories
combined in just 50 years. I'm about to turn 50, so I'm like, whoa. This is a lot of change
in just a pretty short lifetime so far, so that's really unprecedented.
What does this mean? We're hitting kind of an inflection point in this species' history.
Everything is changing. Even the way we're changing is changing right now, right here
in a way that's totally different than anything our species has ever experienced before.
And of course, this increasing population growth and resource consumption and so on
is really degrading our natural resources and even large planetary systems that we depend
on. Let me just mention a few of them and show you some examples. One, of course, is
our use of land and how we're using ecosystems around the world.
For example, this is a rainforest that is being cleared to grow oil palm in Indonesia.
So we see a massive clearing of natural forest to grow a very valuable commodity that's shipped
all over the world. As the economy grows, so does the demand for palm oil.
So this is a huge transformation of ecosystems right at the local scale, but we can look
globally now using satellites and other data to look at our footprint of human activity.
This is just the footprint of food and only food. The green areas are where we grow our
crops-- the plant-based part of our diet. The brown areas are where we grow our animals--
basically the grazing lands and pastures of the world.
Together, you put the green stuff and the tan stuff together-- it's about 38% roughly
of all the land on Earth. All the land there has ever been and all the land there will
ever be is being used for one thing-- to grow food-- which is by far the biggest part of
our footprint on the planet. Nothing else even comes close.
If you put all the cities and all the suburbs together in the world, it's about 0.6% of
the Earth's land. For every acre of sprawl, there are 60 acres of food out there in the
world. So that's huge. We've transformed a planet's worth of land mostly to give us food.
We're also, of course, transforming the water cycle. We're using up what we have to call
the available water. We're not using water molecules. There's still as much water on
planet Earth as there was 3 billion years ago, but what's available to us in fresh water
at the right time in the right place at the right quality-- that is changing pretty dramatically,
and mainly because of our use of water for, in this case, irrigation.
This is a picture looking out the airplane window flying into Phoenix seeing-- I think
it's iceberg lettuce being grown here in the deserts of Arizona using up the Colorado River.
We're not alone in doing things like this. The Soviet Union did it, too. For example,
this is the old Aral Sea of Central Asia.
This Aral Sea is only here because two rivers-- one here and one here-- traveling through
Kazakhstan feed that basin with water. And that water comes from snow melt way, way over
here to the east over towards China. When the snow melts, the water comes down the rivers,
fills the bowl of sand, you've got a sea.
But the Soviets-- like we did-- dammed up rivers and used that water to irrigate the
desert. And they irrigated Kazakhstan primarily to grow cotton of all things in Central Asia,
and you can imagine what happens. Turn off the water supply, boom. There goes the sea.
This is not a small lake. This is not just inconveniencing people who have a cottage
over here or something. This is 300 miles across. It would be like taking Lake Tahoe
and moving it to Montana or something-- and something the size of Wisconsin or something
here. This is a huge-- now extinct, basically-- inland sea, and we did that. That's incredible.
So we're transforming land. We're transforming water at a planetary scale, and we're really
using up our atmosphere as well. Now, we're not using up the air that we breathe. Don't
worry about that. We're still getting enough oxygen. That's cool.
The problem is we're using the atmosphere as a really convenient dump for pollution.
We're putting carbon pollution-- carbon dioxide-- into the atmosphere as well as other gases
like nitrous oxide and methane and a bunch of other stuff that all have the property
of trapping heat in our atmosphere-- something we've known since the 1830s, by the way.
So this is pretty amazing. We are changing the composition of the atmosphere by dumping
stuff into it. The problem is-- and why there seems to be so much disconnect here-- is that
it's invisible to our eyes. If we saw in the infrared, we could see the pollution. But
in the wavelengths our eyeballs see-- visible light-- it's invisible, which is kind of weird.
So it's hard for some folks to understand. How the hell can we change the sky? I don't
see it up there. So I think that's part of the cognitive dissonance we have about climate
change.
The other part is, frankly, we're short. We're only like, two meters tall, and we don't have
wings. So we don't get up into the sky very much, and to our vantage point, the sky looks
like it's infinite.
And we, for thousands of years, told stories about the gods and goddesses up in the sky.
That was their realm, not ours. How dare we say we could change it?
But we are, because the atmosphere, as you know, is actually a fairly thin little layer
of air. The lower atmosphere-- the troposphere, we call it-- where all of our water comes
from, all of our weather, all of our food, ultimately, comes from this about 10-kilometer
thick layer of air-- about six miles. That's not very far at all. We can drive six miles
each day. That's a very short commute here in Seattle.
But if you went six miles straight up, you're heading into outer space. In San Francisco,
I could drive six miles from where I live, and I'd about end up in Berkeley. Now, I didn't
actually go to outer space-- might feel like that sometimes-- but I'm still in San Francisco
area. But if I go straight up, I'm heading into outer space.
So we've changed this atmosphere. We've increased the levels of just one of these gases-- carbon
dioxide-- by over 50% already, and we did it by accident. And we almost didn't notice
it until the 1950s. So this is pretty astonishing.
The bottom line here is we're pushing our planet to many simultaneous limits of its
capacity for land, water, even our atmosphere and climate system to provide a habitable
planet. That's pretty dangerous stuff. There's some real serious issues here.
And almost all of this major global environmental change has come from just three things-- how
we use and produce our food, how we use and produce our water, and how we use and produce
energy. Of course, there are other environmental issues that are important, too, but these
three underpin very large global changes that affect all of us no matter where we live.
So this is pretty big stuff.
So this is an incredible challenge. How are we going to deal with a degraded planet as
we're changing it and we're growing as a civilization?
Now, I'm an environmental scientist. My job is often to just bum you out, right? Did I
succeed yet? People are a little like, oh, my God. And after a while, I realized when
I do this, I don't get invited to parties very much anymore.
So being smart about that, I decided to add some good news to my talks a little bit. Because
it's a funny time to be alive. There are some things that are big challenges indeed, but
there are also some incredible opportunities today. And a lot of things are getting better,
and we definitely should be mentioning them, too.
And things are getting better, at least for people-- not everybody else on the planet.
And people alive today are probably better off than any other humans who have walked
the Earth. Let me tell you why.
A couple of things that have happened-- first, we as a species now live longer than anybody
before us. Just 50 years ago, human life expectancy was 55 years on average for the planet. Today,
it's over 70. That's pretty good.
We have much smaller families. Women have much more control over their reproductive
choices than they ever have before, and they're choosing to have smaller families spaced apart
and later in life. That's good, too.
50 years ago, the average woman on Earth-- on average-- had five children. Today, it's
two and 1/2 and falling rapidly. That's good news if we want to stabilize population and
more importantly to help empower women and girls. So that's really, really good.
We're also far more literate. We were at 50% literacy just 50 years ago. Back in 1900,
only 15% of the world was illiterate at a primary level. Today it's over 85% and growing
rapidly. That's good.
We are more urban. I don't know if that's good or not, but it's an interesting fact.
Over half of our population lives in an urban area now. That's a first for our time in history--
way more mobile, way more connected.
And if you look at data from Steven Pinker and others, they would argue that we're seeing
much less death and harm from violence in warfare than anybody before us in human history--
obviously still too much and very tragic, but we're more peaceful as a species than
any generations before us. So this is the good news.
We as a species are living longer and healthier and better lives in a safer, smarter, and
more connected world. Sometimes it doesn't feel like that, but it's true. And the data
aren't really lying here. This is good stuff.
So here we are. We're in this Dickens moment. Is it the best of times, the worst of times?
Is it a time of planetary crisis, or is it a moment of incredible opportunity? I get
asked this all the time. So which one is it, Jon? Which is it-- good times, bad times?
Which is it?
Here's my answer. It's up to you. Which one do you want? Let's go build it, because we
still get to decide. Do you want a better future, or do you want a really crappy future?
Both of those options are still on the table, and they're not going to be on the table much
longer.
But right now, we still have incredible opportunities to make that choice. So let's go make it.
Let's go build a future we want. I think we can do that, so let's get to work.
But we need to reboot civilization. We need civilization 2.0 now. We need a whole upgrade.
Download the new civilization app or something, right? How do we do this?
We need to think about how we use and produce food, how we use and produce water and energy
and materials, our cities, our very lives-- all of that needs to change. And we call this
"sustainability." That's even the name of this lecture series-- with sustainability.
Now, this word anchors so much of my work and the work of a lot of people in this room
and in fact, this entire building. But you know what? I hate this word with a passion
you cannot even imagine. I hate this word, because it just sucks. I mean, sustainable?
If I were to ask you, hey, how's your marriage? Well, it's sustainable. I'm like, oh, man.
That sucks. I'm sorry. That's kind of a bummer, man.
Nobody would design a marketing campaign with, what do we want? To keep the status quo indefinitely
under certain conditions and following the Millennium Development Goals. Like, what the--
stop. No. This word sucks. I'm sorry.
It's good for wonks. It's good for scientists. But you really want to win people over, we
got to find a better word. What's weird-- to me, anyway-- is there was no word in the
English language for this idea. There's no word in, as far as I know, any Western languages
for this idea.
Hey, how about we build a civilization without destroying it? That would be kind of cool.
We didn't have a word for it. We didn't even think it was something to worry about. That's
kind of crazy.
In German-- I can't speak German, but the German word for sustainability is something
like [SPEAKING GERMAN] I think it's pronounced. The best literal translation is "pasteurized."
It means, let us treat it somehow so it doesn't get spoiled. I'm like, what the hell? We need
a better word, OK? So please work on this.
In the meantime, I don't have a better word, but I know what I mean when I say sustainability.
I'm saying, hey, how about people and nature thriving together? And listen to it today,
and keep doing it tomorrow. That would be good.
But unfortunately, that's more than one word. We need a better word. Let's see if we can
do that. But what we need is we need solutions to get us there. Absolutely we need solutions,
but we also need new kinds of leadership to get us there. Because honestly, we're not
seeing it right now.
So what I want to tell you about tonight is some ideas about solutions in how we change
the conversation and lead ourselves to this more sustainable future. But we have had leadership
in this country before that did inspire us, that did challenge us, that did drive us forward.
We were inspired and challenged by Martin Luther King, who said he had a dream.
He didn't have a PowerPoint. He didn't talk about sustainability or Millennium Development
Goals or whatever. He had a dream. Dreams are things people aspire to. I want to see
the sustainability dream. Let's build it, but we were challenged with a dream.
Or Kennedy asked us, don't ask what the country can do for you, but what can you do for your
country? What can you do for the world, et cetera-- this kind of dream of Kennedy but
also to move to the moon and come back to the Earth. Incredibly inspiring moments--
we've come up with them again and again and again in this country from incredible dreams
to shared visions of who we could be as a people.
And now we have not a common dream, we have a fragmented nightmare. And I don't care who
you voted for. We seem today to not be arguing about the persistence of our dreams and what
we could do together, we're arguing about what version of the nightmare do you believe
is true. Neither of these candidates-- none of them-- offered a dream or hope. They offered
different versions of fear.
And this is where we are today, and this is extremely dangerous. And I really want to
call out all of our politicians. This isn't partisan. A lot of them do this. Our politicians
and media organizations are deliberately doing this to us. They're doing this on purpose.
They're instilling fear. They're dividing us, and they're doing it for themselves for
money, for votes, for clicks, for fame. And we shouldn't even tolerate it. I mean, this
is so dangerous.
And if you don't believe me, look at the data. We've been tracking sentiments in this country--
how Americans feel about their country and things-- polling basically. People have been
tracking this for over 150 years, even in some cases longer. We know very well what's
going on.
Today for the first time-- and this is an incredible new low-- people don't even trust
the media at all. Only 11% of our country have a great deal of confidence in our news
telling organizations. Walter Cronkite must be just rolling in his grave today.
Politicians-- also all time low. I'm kind of surprised it's this high, but 19% of the
country have confidence in the White House, 8% of our legislative branch-- Congress. How
can you have a functioning democracy like this? This is incredible.
We are now paralyzed by fear, anxiety, and distrust. It's incredible. Half of Americans
report significant stress in the last couple of years. A third of us say it's affecting
our health-- mental health, physical health, and combined-- a third of Americans.
Think of the lost productivity. Think of the lost economics behind this. Think of the fear
and all the anxiety that this is producing. And a lot of us-- this is really scary.
And for the first time in American history, more Americans are fearful of the future than
not. That has never happened before, even during the Civil War, even during the Depression,
even during World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Watergate. We've never been this fearful or
this despondent before-- unbelievable.
This is scary stuff, but I want to leave you with one kind of funny statistic. At least
I find it funny but sad at the same time. Even though we're more divided than ever,
there's one fact that gives me a little bit of hope. It turns out that 80% of Americans
do agree on one thing.
The vast majority of us agree that we can't agree on anything. So 80% of Americans agree
that we are more divided than ever. Wow. Now, why am I talking about this? I'm talking about
it, because it's dangerous. This is dangerous for our world. It's dangerous for our democracy,
for everything.
But it's basically because if we don't fix this, nothing else matters. If we can't fix
civil discourse, if we can't fix the cultural erosion of America, if we can't fix the narratives
that we share about ourselves in the future, you can't fix anything else. So in a polarized,
hopeless world, having good science or a new technology or some policy instrument-- it
doesn't matter at all, because no one will even let you talk about it. You can't move
forward together if you're tearing each other apart.
So as a lot of you are biologists, this thing called the Liebig's Law of Minimum-- what's
the thing that limits you most? Right now culture limits us more than science or technology
or markets or policy into building a better world. Because if we don't get this right,
the other stuff can't be implemented. We need to change the conversation. This is so crucial.
So here's what I believe. I believe we can build a better world, but we can only do it
if we can help envision one together. You can't build a better world if you can't share
a vision of what it could possibly be or at least have the conversation around it. But
to do that, we need new kinds of messengers and very different kinds of messages to move
forward.
Now, how about new messengers? Who should be helping us get there? Well, this is a very
biased point of view, because I happen to work at one. But one of them I would argue
are cultural institutions, because that's our business. You want to change culture?
How about people who do this for a living like museums or aquariums, planetariums, parks--
places where people convene, civic places where people come together.
Why could they be helpful? Well, one, museums alone-- full disclosure, I run a museum. But
I'm really glad I do, because guess what? They're freaking huge. 850 million visits
happen to American museums every year. Our population is 340 million, but 850 million
people go into and out of museums every year.
That's an incredible number. That's more than all of the sports stadiums in the country
combined plus all of the theme parks in the country combined. So when you're beating the
NBA, NASCAR, and Disney combined and then some, you got something. And until Facebook,
this was the largest cultural force America ever unleashed in the world. Incredible.
They're also trusted. That's even more important. Museums get about an 80% to 90% approval rating
from Republicans and Democrats. We are not more trusted than we were before, but everybody
else has fallen down. So we are now not only the most trusted institutions in America,
I would say we're probably the only trusted institutions in America right now.
And sadly, universities have fallen dramatically in the last three years. A third of Republicans
think a college education will do their children more harm than good. That was not true three
years ago-- three years ago. That's it. We have a problem.
But museums at least are still trusted. So we're huge, we're trusted, and it turns out
museums do a big share of teaching about science in America today. Now, we tend to think Americans
don't know anything about science. No, that's not true at all.
Our kids do lag behind. If we look at other industrialized countries-- let's say the top
30 countries-- we usually come in around 30th in terms of scientific literacy for, let's
say, a seventh grader or an eighth grader. That's sadly true. Our K-12 systems need a
lot of work.
But if you look at the average 40-year-old, let's say, in America and around the world
and ask, what do they know about basic biology, physics, chemistry, medical terminology, engineering?
Actually, we come in number one in the world. We beat Japan, even South Korea.
What happened? Why? Well, one of the reasons is great universities. Our community colleges,
colleges, universities, research universities, the liberal arts schools, all of them in America
are the best in the world. And also we require all of our students to have some science classes
even if they're majoring in the arts or law or medicine.
So our kids in America have pretty poor scientific literacy compared to their peers at their
age. But later in life, Americans actually get really good scientific literacy, because
our colleges and universities make up for a lot of it.
But also we have the best informal science education in the world. We have the best museums,
the best planetariums, aquariums, zoos, parks. We got the National Geographic. We got Neil
deGrasse Tyson. We got Science Friday.
No other country in the world-- OK. They got Attenborough in the UK, but other than that.
I'd love him to come here. But other than that, we're pretty damn good at this stuff.
And we have Carl Sagan, too. Don't forget about that. So we got some great science communication
in this country.
And it turns out Americans learn-- about 70% of the scientific literacy they get over their
lives happens in informal settings-- not a college, not a K through 12 school, but in
informal settings. And of that, museums are the largest. So strangely, we're the biggest
cultural force in the country until Facebook. We're the most trusted-- certainly more than
Facebook.
And third, we are the biggest science teachers in the country. So I'm like, wow. That's pretty
cool. Maybe we should use that. So if places like museums and parks and aquariums could
step up and be a trusted place for talking about these issues, that would be great.
But we also need new messages, too, and this is one of the things that's so, so important.
Because right now, the dominant narrative about the environment is really dominated
by fear. You hear so much about fear in environmental issues. You'll see-- like on climate change,
for example-- so many pictures of collapsing icebergs, drowning polar bears, forest fires,
hurricanes, you name it. It's designed to make you afraid.
And this is really, really disturbing. But this is a very bad communications strategy,
too, because it doesn't actually hit most Americans. It aims at the edges. There's an
interesting study from Yale called the Six Americas Report that points out that America
is not red or blue when it comes to climate change. There are about six shades of climate
belief in America.
This is what they are. There are people who are critically alarmed. They're not just believing
in climate change. They're really freaked out about it. And that's where the fear messaging
is aiming at.
Over here you've got the people who are totally dismissive and say, not only do they not believe
it, they think it's a hoax. This is like Rush Limbaugh, our president, a few other people
you might imagine.
Oh, by the way, I love this idea, too, that somehow a bunch of scientists could pull off
a global hoax. A bunch of professors got together 150 years ago and said, you know what we're
going to do? We're going to screw with thermometers for the next century just to mess with people.
I'm not sure why we're going to do it, but it'd be a lot of fun. What the hell?
And I look at people like, you really think we're capable of pulling off-- I mean, have
you been to a faculty meeting ever? We can't even agree on the color of the paint on the
walls or something. Come on. This is ridiculous, but OK. You want to believe that, that's fine.
The problem is the messaging on environment here that's primarily fear-based isn't aiming
at most Americans. It's aiming at your base or the enemy. So this is kind of where environmental
messaging has gone completely off the rails.
So this is where those fear-based measures are aiming. This is aiming at your donors
and your activists. These are the people who write your checks and show up at your protests.
Great. And this is the people who hate you. OK.
But you know what? 71% of the country is somewhere in the middle. They're movable, and you're
not talking to them in ways they can hear you at all. In fact, they're tuning out.
So the strategy to connect to the rest of us just isn't working. What we need is different
strategies. They get to that kind of movable middle-- the middle part where people are
concerned, but they don't know what to do. I'm not sure about this. Maybe they're not
that engaged. Or they're doubtful, but they could be convinced. They're at least persuadable.
So how do you do that? Well, first, you have to figure out what inspires them. And hey,
scientists? I hate to tell you this. It isn't facts. I'm a scientist, too, but you know
what? Explaining climate change again to somebody isn't going to suddenly make them stand up.
Oh, now that they explained it the 30th time, I'm super excited. And I'm going to go buy
a hybrid car and put up a solar panel. No. They heard you the first time. They just don't
like you, OK? It's that simple. It's cultural. It's not scientific at all.
So you have to create an emotional connection. They have to want to hear you. And the so-called
science deficit model-- if I just tell them the facts again-- isn't correct. There's evidence
saying that it's wrong.
We need cultural context. We need to make sure people hear you and want to hear you,
and then they can hear the facts. But if they don't want to hear you, they ain't going to
hear you.
So what inspires people? The middle-- those four Americas in the middle-- they don't want
to hear about fear. They want to hear about hope. Give me some hope, because I'm so freaked
out right now. I'm so anxious. I'm hiding under my bed.
And please stop telling me about the problems again of sea level rise or deforestation or
extinction. I've heard it. I got it. What are we going to do about it? You have to focus
on solutions, not just the problems.
I think people in America-- especially those middle four Americas, that group-- the big
one-- they're so tired of partisan bickering and people yelling at each other on Twitter
and cable news and whatever. They're so sick of it, and they would love to see something
about collaboration. How could I work with other people rather than calling them the
enemy and fighting all the time? They're just sick of it.
So if you combine hope, not fear, solutions, not problems, and collaboration instead of
conflict, you got something. And then that middle still respects science. They want to
know, is this grounded in science? Is there some evidence for that? But until you give
them hope and solutions and collaboration, they won't hear the science.
But they want it there, but they can't hear it until you've given them hope and solutions
and collaborative opportunity. Then they can hear the science. And they'll respect it,
because they still respect science.
So that's why we designed this project that I was going to tell you about tonight-- this
thing called Planet Vision. Notice we don't use the word "sustainability" anywhere. It's
about solutions for a better future. Who could be opposed to that?
My museum sees a million and a half people a year. I've met a lot of them. I met people
who voted for Trump, people who voted for Bernie Sanders, people who voted-- it doesn't
matter. Everybody I've ever met, anybody you've ever met still wants the same thing. They
want a better world for their kids, a better world for the future generations. Everybody
wants that.
So why don't we offer that to them? Why don't we talk about it? So we started with better
messages. We're getting into the science now. We're saying, hey, we've got to rethink how
we use food and water and energy.
And it's kind of big stuff, like how we produce food on the global scale and how we use water
and energy-- these kind of big things. That's really cool, but we also have to make it personal.
And I'll show you how we did that later.
We went back to the science and said, what are the solutions we need to the food system,
for example? I used to work on this stuff myself, but others do, too. And we can say,
we've got to figure out how to feed the world, keep feeding the world, and doing it sustainably.
If we're going to do that, we've got to think about land and forests. We've got to think
about yields. We've got to think about efficiency. We've definitely got to think about our diets,
and we definitely have to focus on food waste. These are the areas where solutions are needed.
But the trick we did is we found the solutions and then mapped them into where you are. Are
you just an individual at home who wants to help out? Great. You can start with food waste.
Here's what you can do. Here's what you can do with diets.
Or are you a multi-billion dollar corporation? Amazon, hey. Why don't we talk about what
you can do? Or hey, an NGO or foundation-- hey, Bill Gates, this is what you can do,
and this is what governments can do, and so on and so on.
So this so-called solutions matrix shows you what we need to do but also who can do it,
and you see yourself as part of the team. And we did this for water. We did this for
energy.
And the thing that's really powerful about this is when you tell people, this is what
you can do in your own life, they go, oh, changing light bulbs, getting a hybrid car--
that doesn't matter, because it's just a drop in the ocean. It's not enough to matter. What
we found with focus groups is that, yes, that is a small thing to be sure if you are alone,
but you're not. There's lots of other people just like you.
But you're now on the same team as Elon Musk and Pope Francis and Michael Bloomberg and
Arnold Schwarzenegger-- I don't know, a bunch of people. That's a freaking cool team. I
want to be on that team. You want to be on the team with the pope and Schwarzenegger
and Elon Musk. I don't care what they're doing. You want to be on that team, don't you? I
do.
So that's kind of cool. So you say, hey. I'm not doing it alone. I'm not being lectured
at. I'm shown what I can do, but I'm helping out people I admire and people that are doing
good work, and I'm collaborating. That's very, very powerful.
But we also have to make it personal-- not from the global but to, what does this mean
for your food, your water, your use of energy? And we come up with these simple tips. So
I don't want to go through them all in detail.
But when people ask, what can I do for food at my personal level, we don't want people
to argue about GMOs and organic and just polarize ourselves. And it turns out it doesn't matter
that much anyway in the larger food system. The biggest number of all-- the biggest problem
in the global food system-- is waste. 40% of all the food on Earth regardless of how
it's grown is thrown away or lost in the system. We've got to fix that before we do anything
else.
We have to shift our diets. Too much red meat grown from grain is a massive, massive inefficiency
in the food system. We could do better there. And yes, let's support new kinds of sustainable
farms and fisheries, especially ones that are trying new ideas. That would be great.
So these are kind of common sense things. We did it for water saying, hey, it's mostly
in your food but also your landscaping-- instruments like leaks in your house and updating water
appliances when you need to. Same with energy-- of course, get smart about electricity and
transport and heating and cooling. Here are some tips-- all good stuff designed to save
you money, make you more healthy, more productive, and enjoy your life more.
But then we get to the kind of trickier ones. People do want to talk about this, but we
don't want to preach. And we have to talk about consumption. We buy a lot of stuff.
We throw away a lot of stuff.
And also, this is the third rail, but we're going to touch it-- about population. I'm
going to stop talking about population and lecturing people about their choices about
their families. No. We're talking instead about, hey, how about girls being empowered?
Wouldn't that be a good thing? And when girls are empowered and have more opportunity and
more education, they tend to have smaller families.
But the more important thing is the girls got empowered. That's really cool, and everybody
loves that. So we're talking about big issues. We're doing so in a way that can be heard
by messengers that you can hear in ways that are tangible to you and get you excited, and
this works pretty well.
Let me just show you a short little video clip about this, and then I'm going to show
you how we're going to disperse this and implement it and kind of take it to scale. This is just
a little overview clip that's about two minutes, so let me just roll this and see what you
think.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So this kind of messaging that we're trying to use is upbeat, positive, solutions-oriented--
not blaming people, not pointing fingers-- and joining us, inspiring some kind of collaboration.
We're trying to use trusted local places like your local museum, your aquarium, your home
town institution that's not a corporation, and it's not a government agency. It's just
some local folks who just share stuff with you and your kids with inspiring messages
but also backed up by good science.
So this is kind of where we're going with this. What we want to do is we're distributing
it, as I mentioned-- through museums is one channel. Another, of course, is digital. That's
why we made videos and social media. That will get huge.
And of course, influential audiences like you-- so that's why I'm going around talking
about stuff like this in lecture halls. And we're going to write op-eds and stuff like
that, too. So there's kind of a three-tiered strategy.
But then we also want to roll it out nationally. Right now we're only doing it at the Cal Academy,
my museum in San Francisco. But by this fall and winter, we're going to give it away to
any museum who wants it for free. Here you go-- a little bit like how Seafood Watch is
now in every aquarium in the country.
We want these guides around food, water, and energy to be also in every town and city in
the country, and this is the best way we can deliver it-- in these face-to-face but scaled
encounters. So we're pretty excited about that. You can certainly help us spread the
word if you can, and that would be great.
But let me wrap up, and then I'd love to have some time for comments and conversation at
the end, which would be really great. But here's what I want to ask you to do tonight.
I think you're all here because you care about these issues. We think about these issues
a lot.
And I really want us-- especially the younger people in the audience now, and all of us,
but especially the students and others here-- this is a time unlike any other in human history.
What we decide to do in the next two decades or so will determine the course of human civilization
well beyond our lifetime-- way beyond it.
People are going to look back at our time in history and judge us. Future generations
will look back and say, what did you do in the early 21st century? And I'd like to stand
up and be pretty proud of what we did together.
We have a choice before us. Do we build a better world, or do we let a degraded world
enter our sphere? And we still have that choice, but we should stand up and make it. So that's
so critical.
Also, please dare to hope. To hope in this world right now requires courage. And I see
it in abundance, but we have to bring it together and celebrate it. We must continue to hope.
Don't confuse this with blind optimism. There's no silver bullet technology. There's no invisible
hand in the market that's going to save us. That ain't going to happen. The hands that
are going to fix this world and make it better are the ones right in front of you right now.
Those hands, not the invisible ones, are the ones that are going to change the world.
And that's the difference between hope and optimism. Hope is a verb. It's an active stance
asking you to dare and risk it all and know that you might fail. But you get up anyway,
and you do it again. That's what hope is. Don't confuse it with just blind optimism.
Hope requires courage, so have some.
And finally, I think it's time to make our choice. I told you before-- is it going to
be a great world or a really awful world? And I said, that's up to you. Don't abdicate
that choice. You get to make it still. You're the only people in human history. You get
to determine the future for millennia.
We'll make it now. No other generation has been given that awesome responsibility or
that incredible opportunity depending on how you look at it, so make your choice. And I'm
going to remind you what Robert Wilson once said. He said, "the future is up for grabs."
And "it belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of
consciously creating the future they want."
So with that, I just want to say thank you, and I hope we can lift the lights and have
a little conversation here tonight. And then I'll see what we can do. So thank you for
being here, and I look forward to conversation.
[APPLAUSE]
Sorry about the audio, but I'll use my inside voice. I don't have an inside voice I was
told once. So comments, questions? Let's have a conversation, folks. Yes?
Oh, they're roaming around with microphones, by the way. Because this is going to be recorded
or something, so they like to pick up the audio. So if you could wait for the mics,
great. Then I'll probably repeat them anyway.
AUDIENCE: So one of the things that I'm most excited about right now and something that
I'm seeing more of is the focus on soil as an opportunity ecologically-- way beyond just
trying to preserve it and keep it in place but the whole biology of that soil community.
And I wondered if you might want to comment on that.
JONATHAN FOLEY: Yeah. Let me repeat the question, because you might not have heard it around
the room. The question is a great question about the potential for soils to play a positive
role in shaping a better future.
Extrapolating from your question, but there's a lot of discussion today about what people
call "regenerative agriculture." Not just sustainable agriculture-- let's keep it from
getting worse-- but regenerative, which is a better word-- not great, but better. And
the idea-- hey, we can not only keep it OK. Let's make it even better.
Can we, for example, increase the organic matter of the carbon in the soil to build
up the soil's health, its ability to retain water, its biodiversity and take carbon out
of the atmosphere and lock it up so it doesn't contribute to climate change? Sounds awesome.
Great. But I live in Silicon Valley area, and I'm a little bit wary of the hype cycle.
There are people out there who are over-hyping how much on climate change we can solve with
soils. It's not that much. And soils are like a bathtub. They'll eventually fill up, and
the cows keep burping.
So if we're using grazing systems to restore the soil, that will work for a while. And
there are a couple of cases-- one in Marin County that Whendee Silver has looked at.
One or two others have been published. Most do not, but some systems can be carbon negative
and pull carbon net out of the atmosphere, even accounting for cow burps and cow farts.
But eventually, the soils fill. And by the way, my ex-wife is a veterinarian. And she
taught me one thing at least-- is that cows burp methane. They don't fart as much. They
burp it. I'm sorry to use those words, but hey, we're all adults.
So when people talk about cow farts and silly research on climate change, you can remind
them gently that cows burp methane, thank you very much. I lived in Wisconsin for a
while. It was required that I knew that. So the point is that cows continue to release
methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, after the soils have done restoring. So then what?
But in the meantime, let's fix all the soils we can. That's great. It's good for biodiversity.
It's good for water. It's good for erosion. Win, win, win, win, win, but it's not a silver
bullet.
It's not going to save us from climate change, but it's this piece of silver buckshot. We'll
take it, but it's not a one size fits all solution. But it's certainly one we should
use, absolutely. More questions. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for that talk. You talk a lot about "we," and I really enjoy
what you say about that we should dare to envision our future. But overall, you let
the "we" be rather poorly defined. And the solution that you present is still very centered
around a centrally-crafted message disseminated through top-down intuitions. So my question
is, what do you think the role of your institution is in rather empowering communities to build
a more inclusive vision for our future?
JONATHAN FOLEY: That's a great question. I'm paraphrasing in case you didn't hear it. I
kept on using the word "we" and in a language that's like, hey, we're all doing this together.
And yet she's pointed out very nicely, well, yeah, but you already kind of decided what
you're going to tell people. And you're disseminating something that has already been cooked up
in your museum, so where's the "we?" How has this become our vision collectively? Great
question.
So we are not really a top-down organization. People choose to go to museums. We're not
telling anybody anything they didn't want to come see. We're not forcing people to do
anything, and it's a conversation.
The exhibit that we're doing here-- most of time it's staffed by just a couple of people
who just want to talk to you and have a conversation. So it's actually implementation. It's pretty
conversational. It's very like, hey, what are you thinking here-- stuff like that.
One of the things that's so cool is we want to empower people to do things themselves.
One of the things that was so bizarre to me-- and it sounds like a stereotype, but especially
millennials right now-- people are really afraid to do stuff themselves anymore, like
changing their shower head. A lot of people are like, I don't know how to do that, and
they're afraid to.
What? OK. Or changing the thermostat in your apartment or something-- oh, I don't know
how to do that. I have to hire an electrician. I'm like, no, you don't. We can help you.
So we actually have a-- don't tell Apple this, but we kind of call it the "genius bar." But
not officially, of course. I don't want to get sued by Apple. And the video-- no, we
didn't say that. But it's like, hey, we can show you how to do that, too.
And you know what we do deliberately? Our home improvement table there at the Academy
is not staffed by a 50-year-old white guy wearing plaid or something, which would be
way too typical. We make sure there's older people and younger people, people of color,
women who are doing this more than men, stuff like that. So it is a lot more inclusive and
really tries to reflect who we're talking to, and we listen.
The nice thing about museums is we've learned that we humans have two ears and one mouth.
We should try to use some of that ratio once in a while. So you have really good point
and one that we have to address very, very well.
And so this is why we want to bring this to the local institutions, and this is iterative.
So here's our ideas. Let's hear yours. And this is meant to iterate over time and be
improved. But at a certain point, we also have to obey the laws of physics. In terms
of food, food waste is by far the largest user of land and water and gigatons of carbon
and methane of anything we do. And so we have to stay true to the science, too.
But you raise a really great point. And I don't have a perfect answer for you other
than we listen, we adapt. What we say in San Francisco will be very different than what's
said in Dallas or even Seattle or Detroit or New York. So it should be adapted to where
those conversations take place, because that's really where the action is, as you said. So
it's really cool.
That's a great question, by the way. It's really cool. Somebody in the middle here--
maybe you can get her a mic. Oh, hey.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Jon. Thanks so much for the talk. It was awesome. So I think it's great
that this is being rolled out in museums. I love museums. I would love to work for a
museum someday.
JONATHAN FOLEY: Could you speak up a little bit?
AUDIENCE: I was just saying that I love museums. I would love to work for museums someday.
JONATHAN FOLEY: Subtle hint there, huh?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, subtle hint. However, I think one thing that hasn't been addressed-- at
least in this talk-- is how you would get people from under served communities who might
not be able to afford to attend a museum to learn this material-- to actually have access
to Planet Vision. If it's being offered in museums and museums are trusted, that's great.
But how do you get to the people who might not be able to afford access to the education
there?
JONATHAN FOLEY: That is so, so, so important. So the question was, how do you guarantee
that programming like this-- if it's delivered in museums-- is truly accessible to everybody,
including folks who are economically disadvantaged or otherwise disadvantaged? How do we make
sure everybody hears this message?
I couldn't be more committed to that. We give away 350,000 free visits a year-- more than
anything in the Bay Area by far. Even the San Francisco Giants can't match that. We
do more than any museum on the West Coast, in fact, which is art, science of any kind.
And when we do that, we find that actually the demographics of people who visit our museum
anyway are exactly the same demographics of the nine counties in the Bay Area. It's about
a third Asian, about a third Latino, a third Caucasian and everybody else-- and African
American and everything else. It looks like the Bay Area. That's pretty good.
But you have to have programming that does this. For example, it's not just enough to
waive a ticket price. It turns out kids sometimes can't get to your museum, because the schools
can't afford buses anymore. So Google, for example, last year helped us bring every middle
schooler from Oakland to the Cal Academy. They bought the tickets.
We said, that's not enough. You've got to get the buses, too. They're like, OK, we'll
pay for the buses. They weren't Google buses, they were just school buses. But it was still
cool. That's OK.
And third, we said, you know what? A lot of these kids' parents can't take the day off
of work and be chaperones. The said, we got this, and they sent 20 of their staff for
a week to be voluntary chaperones all week with these kids. That was freaking awesome.
That was really nice.
So we did some stuff like that. Other museums try to do that as well. The Seattle Aquarium
is very good at accessibility programming as well. We all could do better. But really,
the best thing I think I've ever done in my career is a couple of weeks ago we announced
we landed a $20 million set of grants to the Academy to endow field trips for free for
every child in San Francisco kindergarten through fifth grade forever.
Every year they get multiple field trips. Then we give them family passes. Then we have
free family nights where we have interpreters there for people who don't speak English or
Spanish or something, so we have all sorts of interpreters. It was incredible. It's the
only city in the world to have ever done that.
So museums are working really hard to be more accessible, and they're far more accessible
than higher ed I hate to say. Art museums have more to do, but science museums and aquariums
generally look like the communities that serve them. But first, we got to make sure our staff
reflect the community they're in and then our visitorship, and we've got to remove all
those barriers.
And it requires work and money, but we can do it. It is so, so important. I do not ever
want the next Rachel Carson, the next Neil deGrasse Tyson or whoever-- somebody who could
change the world-- to not visit our museum. That would be criminal.
Just because they couldn't afford a ticket or they couldn't get on a bus or something
or their parents couldn't take the afternoon off-- hell no. That's unacceptable. So this
is where we can democratize science the most. We have to keep working on it. Great point,
but there's a lot of room there.
I don't know how much time we have. Got a couple more questions? There's one in the
back there, how about. You want to do that? And then how are we doing on time? How about
two or three more question. Yes.
AUDIENCE: I was just curious to hear what your plans are to globalize these ideas. Your
marketing seems very focused for here in the US museums. How do you plan to extend that
to the rest of the world?
JONATHAN FOLEY: Well, that's a great question. My staff are already kind of freaked out about
the idea of doing this nationally let alone globally. The question was, how do you take
this to a global context?
I don't think it's a good idea for a San Francisco American institution to go to especially transitioning
economy or developing countries and say, here. Hi, I'm a white guy scientist from San Francisco,
and I'm here to help you. No, no.
But if others want to emulate this and say, hey, we'd like to adapt this and use it in
Brazil-- in fact, we've been approached by a few. Can we translate this and use it in
our country? OK. We'll think about that, but first, we're just doing it locally. We're
going to try it nationally for a while.
But before we can go globally with this, we have to find the right institutional partners
starting in a few places and let them adapt it to-- again, your question. How do you make
it theirs, not ours? And so this has to evolve and really reflect the communities in which
they exist, and it may not translate.
The whole premise is based on that six Americas data set of what connects to the movable center
of America that hasn't been talked to about these kinds of issues effectively. But in
France, it's a little different-- or in New Zealand or in Sweden or whatever.
So I think we'd have to redesign it and pivot it, but some of it could be recycled. And
we love recycling, so that's good. So we'll see how that goes. I think we got time for
one or two more questions, I think. This gentleman in the front here.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you have-- this is wonderful news for museums. And I wonder
if you have a program to get this news out to the various museums. We have in Seattle
the Pacific Science Center. And they have a reduced price for disadvantaged folks, and
it's tremendously successful. So the parents take their kids there for babysitting and
free entertainment, and it's just a great deal for getting the word around.
JONATHAN FOLEY: Well, what we're going to do-- the question is, hey, will this show
up in Seattle like at the Pacific Science Center is what it's called. Yeah, absolutely.
We're already talking to the Seattle aquarium. We're going to talk to them.
We'll have talked to the Burke Museum, which is a jewel. I guess you're getting a new building
for it here? I'm really excited about that. That's pretty cool. So you have a rich set
of great, great aquariums and science, natural history style museums here in Seattle.
I was just in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. They're excited about it, and we all
talk to each other. And what's nice is a lot of museums cover all the sciences a little
bit, like astronomy one day and zoology the next and something in between every other
day. Our museum is only about life and the environment and sustainability. That's all
we do, so we're kind of seen as the go-to people for this stuff.
Monterey Bay curates the Seafood Watch app on your phone, or you might have seen it in
aquariums. But all the aquariums use it, and they're glad. Hey, thanks, Monterey, for putting
that together and sharing it with us. We're going to do the same thing.
So yeah, I'm sure this will be in Seattle. In fact, the American Associations of Zoos
and Aquariums is meeting in Seattle this fall where all the CEOs of the largest aquariums
and zoos in the country come together. And we're going to be there with a big booth saying,
hey, here you go. And zoos may be another place, but we're going to focus probably on
aquariums-- they're a little bit more set up for this-- and museums and others, too.
We're not going to deny it to other groups.
Those of you who are university professors-- I toyed around the idea of writing a little
companion book for this. Not a textbook. God, no. I would just rather not live than write
a textbook for me. Sorry. Not something I want to do.
But I thought of a light little reader that could be like a companion book. There are
about 100 people in the country who probably teach most of the freshmen global environment
101 courses at these big universities like UW or Penn State or Arizona or whatever. We
could talk to those central people and say, hey, here's a reader that you could add as
a supplementary reading to your class.
And it's free. It's fun. It's not just science. It's a little bit more. We haven't done that
yet, but we thought that's another cool audience we could reach-- the college freshmen lecture
course. Why not? But we haven't done that yet, so hopefully we'll build more audiences,
too.
OK. Any one last question? I think we have time for that. Otherwise we should wrap it
up. OK. Erica Howard, how about you? This is a former graduate student of mine I haven't
seen in a while, so I'm very pleased to see you here.
ERICA HOWARD: Hi, Jon. Good to see you. So last question-- sorry if this is--
JONATHAN FOLEY: Oh, you're going to stump me, aren't you? You're going to get even.
ERICA HOWARD: I'm wondering-- so cultural institutions like museums are more trusted,
potentially because they've been less politicized in the past. And as you develop a higher profile
and get into this kind of messaging, is that still going to be true?
JONATHAN FOLEY: That's a great question. So if you didn't hear, the question is, so you're
trusted now. But if you keep going, what's going to happen-- paraphrasing. Yeah. That
might happen.
But if you have trust capital and you don't spend a little of it, what are you doing it
for? If we just sit on the sidelines during the most urgent period in human history, I
think it's unethical and recklessly irresponsible-- especially of scientists-- to stay out of
the discourse of our world.
For some bizarre reason, scientists think they have a Hippocratic oath of saying, thou
shall not touch politics. I would encourage you to learn some Greek. You know what "politics"
means? It means the affairs of the people. It doesn't mean partisanship or elections
or nominating a candidate. That's not what that means. It means talking about our issues
together as a people.
Science should definitely be part of politics with a lower case p. Call it politics with
a capital P, if you will-- partisanship, endorsing a candidate-- you can't do that at a nonprofit.
You shouldn't touch that. Of course. That's just good stewardship.
But you should definitely enter this discourse, and I think museums have to. But we're sticking
our necks out more. We're the only museum on Earth to have divested from fossil fuels.
We're the only museum on Earth to say, we will embrace the Paris accord. In fact, we're
going to beat it easily. We stand for LGBT issues. We do a whole bunch of things.
Because not only are we a science institution, we are the largest cultural institution of
any kind in America's supposedly most progressive city. Seattle might come in second. I don't
know. Maybe you're going to beat it. I don't know. We think we are, but you probably do,
too. It's like what Lake Wobegon. We're both number one. It's great.
So we ought to step up, because who else will? But does that mean we're going to get some
static for it? Oh, yeah. I've lost a few donors-- not many, but a couple. One or two that hurt,
but that's OK. I can still look myself in the mirror, and I think we're doing the right
thing.
But we should still be objective, driven by evidence, and have empathy. I think this is
where people lose trust-- is when they don't believe the other side is even being fair
or that they're out of touch.
Let me leave one last comment about universities a little bit and the erosion of trust. That
wasn't quite your question-- but since we're at a university in this question of, how does
trust get eroded? You know why universities are losing the trust battle in America? You
think it's a fact battle. It's a culture battle, and you're getting your *** kicked.
You know why? Because you look like you're out of touch. This is why they're doing this.
People who want to discredit science for their own financial and personal gain-- and you
can guess who they are-- they don't want to argue with environmental scientists about
science. They want to paint you as out of touch liberal elites who aren't real Americans.
In fact, there are memos-- strategy documents out there showing exactly how they're doing
that. If you fall for that trap, you're helping them. So don't do that. Please try to figure
out how to connect back to regular American values. Talk about emotional things that connect
you to people's values, then you bring in the science and the scholarship.
But if you seem out of touch, liberal elites in the ivory tower, you've already lost. Museums
do a better job of this, though we need to do better. Art museums need to do better,
but we do a little bit better at that. But we have to be-- I think empathy, kindness,
and respect, especially with the people we disagree with.
The worst thing in the world if you want to make friends is to call somebody stupid. And
unfortunately, sometimes in the academic community-- think like Richard Dawkins or something like
that-- we come off as a little smug and a little too hoity-toity. That doesn't help
our cause. So totally right point.
But I think if we navigate it with respect and empathy and kindness and a little determination,
we'll probably be OK. Talk to me again in five years. We'll see. Hey, thanks so much
for being here tonight. I really enjoyed it, and there will be some time a little bit later.
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