Transcript: Well, there are fewer and fewer skeptics, I mean we are down to the usual names that we hear over and over again, it sort of like, the discussion that has finally died down about what the cigarettes really cause cancer, for a while you could always find some doctor who is on the take form the American tobacco institute or something like that, who would say “Well we don’t have enough research in, it is not proven.” There are very few skeptics left top deal with, I am not scientist, I am a journalist anecdotally I am as an observer out there, I have seen things like in the permafrost I have seen glacier lakes, which basically those where holes that would dug by receding glaciers that later got, or advancing glaciers that later got filled by an iceberg that fell into them and it melted and it is where fossil glacier water has been held in place by frozen permafrost for the last 10,000 years and now suddenly as there permafrost is slaying all the levels of these lakes are dropping some of them have disappeared, that is pretty compelling when you see that. In an Antarctica and in southern Chile I have seen glaciers receding, you see grasses growing on the edge of the Antarctic peninsula right now, the droughts that I have mentioned earlier and just the convulse of climate gyrations, mean that we have definitely perturbed the climate and all this tracks directly with the increases in carbon dioxide that began at the beginnings of the industrial revolution and particularly intensified after 1950. The ice corals, the pollen course from the bottom of the lakes all of these things show that we haven’t had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for nearly 700,000 years and the earth was a really different place back then. So, I suspect that climates are changing right now. Atmosphere of scientist who I talked for this book, suggested that if we stop tomorrow, putting carbon up are chimneys, it would take about a 100,000 for the earth to reabsorb it all. Fortunately, most of that would happen in the first few centuries and so that means that any reduction in our carbon contributes this atmosphere right now would be extremely helpful. So, we should start thinking about it, yesterday.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Transcript: Not that I am aware of so far until about 5 billion years from now, when the sun expands, I mean it each time in the past ever, since life appeared on this earth, life just keeps getting richer and more complex and then there are some big disasters and there are huge diebacks, but then it comes back in yet some other amazing way. We get turtles where we never had them before or we get these dinosaurs or we get these mammals. Eventually, the sun will expand and the earth will heat up, we are talking 5 billion years from now and probably what's going to happen is that the bigger life forums will die off, because the food to support them or the water to support them will become scarcer and scarcer and we will be back to microbes again and we may go millions of years with just microbes, just the way we started with millions of years of just microbes. Eventually, the earth would probably be consumed by the sun and then there won’t be life left on earth, but it is possible that some of those microbes may have escaped the earth. I mean some of them already have, they have been on our space craft, it is amazing we bring back space stuff and find out there is some microbe that we felt which is sterilize the way was there in there the whole time in some frizzed dried condition, it survived very well, these things may be more and destructible, in fact it may be the way that life came to earth in the first place. Aboard some mediator or some comet or as some science fiction people have suggested about some rocket ship from some other galaxy, whatever life may be the eternal thing that is floating around the universe and even some that emanates from earth may just keep floating out there, that we won’t know.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Transcript: Sure there is lots of things that we can do, one thing I was asked that question once, right when my book first came out, I was giving a book signing in Denver. I was asked to speak to a group of young democrats, actually it doesn’t matter, because I will speak to anybody and the same thing happens at both their meetings. You go in and there is young professionals who have now have a party of legions and not only do they show up for these meetings, but also I didn’t realize just but you get this sort of fringe of candidates standing at the back of the room, who all want to meet these people and glad hand them and get to know them and get their votes. So, at one point one of the young democrats says “what could we do now to make things better?” and it just popped on to my head, because I talk in the book about how all these plastic is escaping and most of the plastic is used for food packaging and also an expert explained to me that even paper, when we bury it in our land fields it doesn’t biodegrade right away, because if there is no oxygen there they can read newspapers a 100 years old, at the bottom of land fields. So, I replied to this guy, “Well here is something that you can do, turn around and ask all these people, I am pointing at these candidates behind of, that if they are elected to the Colorado legislature will they promise to introduce a bill making it a crime to give away a free bag in a Colorado supermarket” and that struck everybody as a really great idea, in a sense that would be something that wouldn’t be so hard to do, because plastic did not enter the main stream until right after World War II. So, back then our grand mothers when they went to the market, they carried this bag and they filled up with everything that they bought and they didn’t have to put the cucumbers in one plastic bag and the onions in a separate plastic bag etc like we do now, I mean, but the flavors would not mix, they take it home, they dump it out and then they bring the same bag back over and over again. That is not a really hard change and I have noticed it, this is one of these kind of spontaneous occurrences that seems to simultaneously appear in lots of cultures all over the world. Suddenly, it is happening everywhere, lots of grocery chains, the entire country of Ireland is instituting this policy that if you want a bag, you have to buy it and that is terrific, that is one thing that we could be doing now to really- really help. There are ways that we could be saving so much energy. Even in northern climbs if every single flat roof top has solar collectors on it, just to heat the water which is cheap technology, we would be saving 20% to 25% of the energy demands on every single building. In the Southwest where I have a lived a lot and where I am currently teaching at the University of Arizona, I teach there once a year, the architects still think that buildings should be built with that depends solely on air-conditioning or solely on heating and so they built these buildings with windows that cannot open, I mean it is amazing, they do this a lot, and that is crazy, most of the year you can open the windows and you don’t have to have some pump and some compressor that is circulating air and using energy. So I don’t go on and about all this stuff in my book, lots of other peoples books are about this and my intention for this book was not to make people feel guilty about what we are doing right now, I wanted them to, I want to just clear the decks of us, so they can see how nice things would go, if you would stop doing it, but yeah, I think there is a lot of things we could do and we have to try doing them all.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Transcript: I will be honest with you, I have refrained from looking at their policies until the dust settles form the primaries and I see who the candidates are, because then the issues are going to be rather clear. During the last election, I wrote a piece for the Los Angles times that was a Sunday op-ed, analyzing the, I was asked to analyze the difference between George Bush’s energy policy and John Kerry’s energy policy. Basically, what I described is that, both of their policies where barely connected to reality at all. In the case of Bush, mainly it was a fossil fuel-based policy that I think has gotten us into enormous  trouble, both in terms of atmospheric chemistry, climate change and this tragic world that we are involved in Iraq right now. In terms of Kerry, he was talking about all kinds of renewable technologies that we where going to have, but it was very clear that these where phrases that he was mouthing that we are not connected to what the reality of the technological development was. We don’t have hydrogen cars that we can all be and buy 2020. I mean we have been trying to make them from a long time, I have been studying this since the mid-90s, when I started writing about the development of hydrogen cars. I went to Germany, because the Germans between Dainmler, Benz and BMW were trying do it. That was an outgrowth of when Hitler lost the Romanian oil fields and he didn’t have any oil. So, they where burning wood to strip the hydrogen literally out of gassified wood to run things and things like that and that is why the Germans where the pioneers of hydrogen vehicles. But even today they are still, it is too costly in terms of both money and energy to get hydrogen pure, separated from the stuff that it is locked up with, carbon or oxygen, hydrogen does not exist in a free form in our universe and it's hard to mass produce fuel cells. Even if we did have hydrogen and the presidential candidates in the past have really avoided taking detailed looks at the environment, because we don’t have solutions and they want to be offering solutions or it's really complicated and it doesn’t fit into sound bytes, but once we have two candidates, I can assure you, I am going to be writing about this looking at their policies very hard and going to be analyzing to see who makes more sense. Or if the democratic nominating process becomes protracted in to the summer, I won’t wait that long, I mean I have been busy doing other things, so I haven’t done it yet, but certainly Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, ultimately if one of them, or if Senator Mc Kain ends up, I guess there are three senators, they all end up, anyone of them ends up in the White House, all of their policies are going to be underlined by the environment and the nature and the environment will trump politics, culture, everything every time, because if we don’t have an earth to stand on, we don’t have any place to exercise our policies.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Transcript: Well, eventually, yes. Humans are doomed, because every species eventually goes extinct, just like every dies eventually. I mean that true in the whole history of biology. Now, in this book, I purposefully avoided talking about, what I think could be the scenario, which is if we go on business as usual, just using the same dirty fuels that are completely destroying the chemical balance or changing the chemical balance of the atmosphere and the seas and the land in ways that we no longer can control. The outlook is rather bleak. It looks like we are going to have more and more biological loses until we start losing stuff that we really depend on. I mean there are crashes of our pollinators right now, these last years started to go dumb, bats are going down right now and that's going to affect our food supply. Our sheer numbers which is something that it’s a fact that I drop in towards the end of the book, is also an issue. I mean, if we keep growing by a million every four days, which is the way the human rates is growing. At a certain point we are going to have outstripped the resources of the planet to support us. That the only way that we are surviving as well as we are alright now, is that we have used incredible technology, agriculture technology to stretch our food resources, but that's starting to have negative repercussions. Part of that technology is rather simple, we just scraped away more forest, wilderness, habitat, et cetera to grow more stuff, but now we are start to miss the species that used to use that like migrating birds that would stops in the tree as of Central America or of Indonesia or of Africa on their way between the hemispheres. We need those spaces in many ways, they spread seeds, they do all kinds of useful things and they're beautiful, they inspire us. We have also force fed the land with chemicals and we probably do not have time to get into that now, there are books that talk about that great length, so I certainly touch on it, here because some of those chemicals are really changing the way other things live on the land, including possibly us. More and more physicians are concerned that all these poisons that we use to keep pests away et cetera might possibly be poisoning us in some ways that are cumulative. So, yeah, I am really concerned that if business goes on as usual, we are going to hasten our extinction. But, by the same token, we are also in the flower of our species life, right now, we can do so many things, yes we produce some bad stuff that I talk about in the book like PCB's or plastics, which in of themselves are very useful except an unintended consequence of their production is that we did realize that nothing knows how to break them down yet, they are very indestructibility as become plague, because they're every, there is big rafts of to them floating on the oceans. At the same time we're also creating wonderful thing, we create beautiful art, we create wonderful music, technological advances like the computers that we communicate to each other with, we are kind of thrilling and I would like to think that with all this knowledge that we have, we have been in this information age that we're going to segue into a wisdom age, where since we pride ourselves in being this species that some times we call ourselves the only species, I am not sure that is we have anyway knowing, but we call ourselves the only species, that could foresee the consequences of its action, that can consider the future. Well, knowing the future or understanding what will happen is one thing, having the wisdom to do something about is another and obviously we have to bring ourselves back in the balalnce.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Question: What is the state of journalism today?

Transcript: Journalism is in the critical state these days. It started over a decade ago with newspapers being absorbed by corporations. They used to be family-run or journalist-run and then they became line-items in corporations who, as they further consolidated, treated these thing as items that either were bringing profits or bringing loses. To the economize they start to cutting back on staff, particularly say when one corporation ends up owning several media outlets, like they almost like Los Angles Times and The Chicago Tribune or they own a bunch of TV stations and some executive who knows nothing about journalism, begins to say, “How come we need all these different correspondents out there, that’s just redundancy, let’s cut down on that.” Well as a result of that, we lost a lot of coverage in the world, and then, to make the matters worse, a very useful and potentially wonderful medium called the Internet showed up, and people started reading their news much more so on the Internet. I read my news on the Internet, because I travel so much. And the average age of a person, picking up a newspaper is over 55 now in the United States. Well, the problem is it those newspapers, who have always had reporters out there. So, when you read the news digested by Google or digested by Yahoo. They’re just getting their content from a whole lot of other places, but those whole lot of other places are going broke, because the advertisers are all going in to Google and Yahoo. The Google and Yahoo do not send correspondents in the field, I assure you. I recently spoke at Microsoft and I had this discussion with them, suggesting that these big media companies, big internet companies that now are controlling information, if they really care about the fate of the globe that they are serving, they are going to somehow enter in a profit-sharing arrangement with newspapers or with local TV or radio, to help us get the number of correspondents we need out there to let us know what is going on. 

Question: Will we ever see that?

Transcript: I don’t know. You know, someone in Microsoft said “Well, do we really need, a lot of reporters out there, don’t we just need good editors, because if we have got a bunch of people in the field who are just citizens, who with a cell phone can send us the pictures of things that they happen to witness that they see them and can tell us what is going on and the editor can type of the story, isn’t that good enough? Hasn’t the internet made everybody a journalist in that sense?” And my reply was: “Not really, I mean sometimes a local citizen can be on the spot for something enormous and they can create an enormous contribution.” In other words a famous photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize of students being killed at Kent State that helped bring down the Vietnam War several years ago, a bystander took that photograph, but it takes training and it takes experience to know not just how to report something that you’re seeing in front of you, but how to do all of the research that goes in to building a story to be able to go to separate sources to corrobororate what you’ve seen or what you have understand with what they see. Everybody’s got different versions and good journalist have to run, they have cover the panorama of those different versions until the truth starts to emerge, and we need trained journalists out there, otherwise we are going to have this technological version of the feudal system, which we had back in the Dark Ages when a few wealthy princes controlled all the money and all the information that leaked down to the people. I respect the power of the Internet to democratize things that if it just blogging, blogging is mainly people sitting in chairs, giving their opinions about stuff, they are not out there in the field doing what journalists do. So I am very concerned about the fate of journalism.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Transcript: My name is Alan Weisman. I am the author of “The World Without Us.” I am a journalist, I have written for many major magazines, public radio and I have written several other books. I born was in Minneapolis, I grew up outside of town on the edge of what today is elegantly termed as wetland, back then we called it the swamp. I spent much of my boyhood in that, though it was a combination of woodland, marshlands, filled with animals, filled with birds and I was really festinated by them. I still have the first book I ever bought, it was Audubon’s “Guide to Eastern Birds” and I grew up thinking, I was going to be a naturalist or scientist and a that lasted until eight grade when, there was the Science teacher, who hated me and the English teacher who loved me, you know how that goes. Well, I went to college really with no idea of what I wanted to do with my life whatsoever. I went to college, because I was supposed to go to college. That was mandate that came down from on high in my family. I had no professional aspirations, whatsoever other than I liked to read. So, I became a English major, because I got grades for doing whatever I was already doing, which is reading these works of literature and ultimately, in my senior year in college, I sort of went into a panic, wondering what to do and all of my roommates were applying to law school, so I just applied thinking that maybe I would do that, and it was the time of great ferment and torment in the United States, because of the Vietnam War, so radical lawyers were becoming celebrities, and they were supposedly helping to reshape our country. So, I went to law school at the University California at Berkeley. That lasted almost an entire semester, by Thanksgiving I was long gone, I was not cut out to be a lawyer, but the only thing that I was really any good at, was legal writing and I realized that words really were my future, and I decided to become a journalist because, journalists often times, people like myself who can't decide what you really want to do with your life, so journalism will get you poke you nose into what everybody else is doing and at least for few moment share that with them and that's pretty much been what’s happened ever since.

Recorded on: 2/5/08

Thank you very much for bringing a respectful, clear explanation to the paradoxical nature of 'our' chosen 'internet.'

Not in such a succinct manner have I indicated similar concerns and observations, even here on the bigthink plane. It appears difficult for so many to realize there are alternatives to 'internet' and the future of networking can and will change dramatically in the nearest of futures.

Again, thank you for contributing so much more than regurgitated prattle! It confirms hope for a better communication process between humans at this stage of development.

Sincerely,

Whitman Moore