The 11th Hour - English Transcript

This is Gulf Coast 3629, radio 811. We gotta mobilize that area. - Responding to incident. When you look at the history of humanity... ...it's basically a relationship between the two most complicated systems on Earth: Human society and nature. And whether people have, in fact, lived in a good balance in that regard. When they don't, they're gone. At the end of the day, when we all talk about saving the environment... ...in a way it's misstated because the environment is going to survive. We're the ones who may not survive. Or we may survive in a world we don't particularly wanna live in. Our biosphere is sick. We have a planet that's behaving like an infected organism. If you look at it from space, you see all these lights... ...and it's the lights of planet Earth, it's the lights of the people... ...but it's also almost like looking at an organism that has an infection on it... ...that is forming a crust of some kind. Well, I don't only think that the biosphere is in trouble... ...I know it is. I just have to look around in the environment in which I live. What I hear in my dreams... ...is generations in the future screaming back to us in time... ...saying, "What are you doing? Don't you see?" We are at this critical point in time. We've evolved to be the leaders of our biological community. We are misleading. We are causing the devastation... ...to our very foundation of our life system that has given us birth. And we are ultimately committing suicide. So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process. There's no escaping that conclusion. Earth 's life-support system 's damaged. The human species at risk. Could this be true? In this film, we've reached out to independent experts on the frontlines... ... of what could be the greatest challenge of our time: The collapse of our planet's ecosystems... ... and our search for solutions to create a sustainable future. So if we look for the cause of this planetary destruction... ... what would we find? We would find a global civilization created by the human mind. A mind that has evolved to have the ability to reflect back on ourselves... ...to take stock of our own existence. A mind able to discover quantum physics, explore outer space... ...and peer into our own DNA. But beyond our stunning intellectual and technological advances... ...we would also see our large-scale impact on our home, planet Earth. Ecological disasters are rarely covered. But when they are, they're depicted as isolated incidents by the media. But if we connect these events... ...will we find a larger story that needs to be told? A human story. And more so than that... ...a global understanding that takes into account who we are... ...and the state of our relationship to this planet, our only home. Life on Earth is possible... ...only because a number of parameters lie in certain very narrow ranges. Some of these are clearly environmental. Like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure to have lived with water. Creation is the universe. Creation is everything that we can see and probably a whole lot that we can't. Probably more that we can't see. But it's what's about us... ...and it's the relationship... ...this amazing web of life that we have here. Well, Earth is a planet that's just far enough from the sun... ...and has just enough of that atmosphere of a certain composition... ...that more heat stays here than radiates out to space. And the sun warms the planet and that heat radiates out. There's gases in the atmosphere that have always trapped some of that heat. So we're not an ice ball. Scientists have compared the different planets... ...going away from the sun as being like the Goldilocks effect. There's one that's too cold, too warm and just right... ...and we just happen to be there. Forty million centuries ago, that a cell formed... ...and that cell had a gene, and that gene is the password... ...to every single other form of life there is. And the amazing thing about the human body... ...is it has one hundred trillion cells and 90 percent of them are not human cells. They're fungi and bacteria, microorganisms. And the thing that makes us human is not human. So within us is basically the back-story of life on Earth... ...right to that first original cell 40 million centuries ago. And if you could, for a moment... ...stop and feel what is happening in your body... ...there are six septillion things going on at the same time. That's a six with 24 zeros after it, okay, going on right now. Right this instant, as you sit in your chair and then in the next instance... ...within 10 seconds, a hundred more things have happened... ...than in all the stars and planets and asteroids... ...in the known universe in your body, and that is called life. *** sapiens sapiens is an incredibly young species. We don't think of that. But we are. We came very late in the calendar year of the Earth. You know, if the Earth calendar... ...you know, where it started in January 1 and now we're December 31 st. We got here 15 minutes before midnight on December 31 st... ...and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last 60 seconds. Perhaps the best description of what we are is, as Jared Diamond puts it: The third chimpanzee. There are two kinds of chimpanzees and there's us. But in some ways, we are extraordinarily special. And the most obvious one is our extraordinary ability to make tools... ...our extraordinary ability to communicate. To have very detailed discussions with each other. So we are fundamentally groups of animals... ...randomly scattered throughout the planet... ...slowly coalescing in groups... ...that are more powerful, larger. And very much conditioned by two essential characters: One is opportunism and the other one is greed. All the animals and vegetables are opportunistic creatures. They do what's necessary for them to do in order to survive. I think it was the human mind basically... ...that threw us out of balance with the rest of nature. The tragedy is that it was the human mind... ...that was the key to our very survival. Now, when you think that we evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago... ...and compared to other animals on the plains then, we weren't very impressive. We weren't very many or very big, we weren't gifted with special senses. The one thing, the key to our survival... ...and our taking over the planet was the human brain. But because the human mind invented the concept of a future... ...we're the only animal on the planet... ...that actually was able to recognize... ...we could affect the future by what we do today. We look ahead, recognize where the opportunities are... ...where the dangers lay, and choose accordingly to survive. That was a great survival strategy of our species. If the human mind threw us out of balance thousands of years ago... ... what changed in recent history? In the last century, we've dramatically increased our impact on planet Earth. One element has emerged that has made us even more destructive... ... accelerating our disconnection... ... and causing extensive damage to our climate and all other natural systems. A fundamental illusion in the world is that people are separate from nature. When the reality is that we are part of nature. In fact, we are nature. That's probably the most fundamental misunderstanding in the world... ...that's causing all this havoc. I think one of the reasons why it's so difficult for people to get it... ...that we're connected with nature and to even understand... ...the fundamentals of ecoliteracy... ...is because it flies in the face of the assumptions of our culture. Our culture is built on the assumption that we are the superior life form on Earth. That we are separate from all other life forms. That we have been given dominion over all other life forms. But even to think that we're separated from nature... ...is somehow a thinking disorder. You can't be separated from nature. Why we think that way is the interesting thing. What happens in the mind that likes to think that it's separated from nature? Does that mean that the mind, or the human being, thinks he's now more free? We're totally living in disharmony with the planet. Not just the planet. Beyond the planet. We're far beyond the planet now. We're zooming around Mars and all of that exploration, which is marvelous. But it's not really affecting our attitudes. I think our attitudes are based on selfishness... ...based on the economic situation we have... ...based on the politics which we have. I mean, those are the... How many governments in the world... ...have really taken the environmental crisis for what it is? Very few. Certainly not the United States. We live in a human-created environment... ...where it's very easy to think we're different from other creatures. We're smart, we create our own habitat, we don't need nature. It's the economy that's the most important thing. And in focusing on the economy... ...I think we've forgotten these ancient truths. These ancient wisdoms that kept us plugged into nature... ...and understanding that "Gee, if we do something to offend the natural world... ...we'll pay a price for that. We have to treat nature much more gently." That's the lesson that we've forgotten and that we're paying a price for today. The big rupture came in the 1800s, in the 19th century... ...with the steam engine, the fossil-fuel age, the industrial revolution. This was a great rupture from earlier forms and rhythms of life... ...which were generally regenerative. After the industrial revolution, nature was converted to a resource... ...and that resource was seen as, essentially, eternally abundant. This led to the idea and the conception behind progress... ...which is, limitless growth, limitless expansion. For all of human history... ...the vast majority of human history... ...humans lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the fields, the fields grew plants. The plants made cellulose, plant matter. Animals ate the cellulose, we ate the plants. We ate the animals, we wore clothing made out of them. We were living off of current sunlight. It was our food supply, our clothing, we heated with wood... ...it was our heat supply, our light supply. It was all current sunlight. The sunlight that fell on Earth in a year was the maximum amount we could use. It was the maximum amount of energy that we could use. And from the earliest evidence of human civilization... ...150,000, more or less, years ago... ...up until a few thousand years ago, pretty much, that's how we lived. And our population never surpassed a billion people. And then we began discovering that there were pockets of ancient sunlight... ...and finding coal here and a little bit of oil there. And slowly between that and the agricultural revolution... ...slowly, our population crept up until we hit our first one billion people. And so... It didn't take 100,000 years to go from one billion to two. Our second billion only took us 130 years. We hit two billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960. Amazing. When Kennedy was inaugurated, there were half as many people as today. The reason that we've been able to have this exponential growth of population... ...is because we're creating food... ...and clothing and everything else, transportation. We're doing it all with this ancient sunlight... ...that was stored in the Earth 3 and 400 million years ago. And if we had to go back to living off current sunlight, lacking technology... ...the planet couldn't sustain more than a half a billion to a billion people. So we live in the most unusual period in the history of the planet... ...in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon. What we have done is become good alchemists. The ability to take fossil carbon... ...and turn it into human biomass. And we have used the supermarket... ...the transportation system, to make that happen. So the cornerstones of this system that we have... ...are all resting upon... ...nonrenewable, energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels. The real problem is there are too many of us using too many resources too fast. Now, oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all other resources... ...everything from topsoil to fresh water, from aluminum to zinc. Oil is really the basis... ...with which we sustain complexity and with which we solve our problems. In a sense, all of our lives are subsidized. We are subsidized by oil. Because we're subsidized by oil... ...when we shop for anything at a store, we don't pay the full price. We don't pay the full cost of what it took to produce that. We borrow about $800 billion a year from the world... ...to finance the excess of our consumption over what we produce. And about a third of that, about $250 billion a year, is for oil imports. So we borrow from the world, we issue IOU's, treasury bills, whatever... ...to the tune of about a billion dollars a day, every working day, anyway... ...to finance our oil imports. Oil does a lot of harm. Economists would call them "externalities" ... ...because they're external to the price you pay at the pump. For example, the asthma rates among children... ...which are growing in many parts of the US. The acid rain problem that's caused by burning coal. If you look at some of the global warming contributions... ...from burning fossil fuels. And at least part of the cost of keeping our troops in the Middle East... ...to safeguard oil assets. Maybe not all of that cost, but at least some... ...is clearly a subsidy that goes to oil. When you started feeding off of the fossil-fuel cycle... ...we began living with a death-based cycle. That death cycle... ...of dependency on extraction of those resources... ...set in motion a sequence of events... ...that has led us to our modern crisis of global disturbance... ...known as climate change, or global warming, if you will. We don't know the future. We know the past through Greek mythology. The kind of revenge of the gods or the revenge of nature. We're seeing that now already, after 200 years of the industrial revolution. We didn't know what we were creating, the damage that was being created. We're sensing that. So as we go forward with technology even more powerful than before... ...we have magnified... ...the presence of the human race inside the ecology. Therefore we can do more damage... ...with our technological prowess than we could before. We have to be even more cautious. While we weren 't looking... ... we've created one of the biggest problems facing all of humanity: Climate change. How does it look... ... when we don 't pay attention to the massive amounts of CO 2... ...we dump into the air and water? How does it look when our actions... ...shift the natural chemical balance of our atmosphere... ...into a state several degrees warmer? A state that hasn't existed for millennia. We have witnessed, in recent years... ...the highest average temperatures in recorded history. A couple of degrees difference in today's temperatures may not sound like much... ...but it only took a few degrees to shift us out of the last ice age. And a few degrees may be all that separates us from catastrophic change. Heading into another weekend... ...the weather and the climate are making news in more than one region. A terrible drought has already... We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. - Severe flooding has killed at least 72 people... ...in Central and Eastern Europe and Western Russia. The heaviest recorded rainfall in Indian history... ...has unleashed the worst flooding in memory. We do not know how fast change will occur... ...or even how some of our actions could impact it. In Chicago, the heat is a plague. This morning, they were collecting bodies. - Firefighters in Southern California are battling a newly-formed super wildfire. The heat is on. Even Arizona is having a heat wave. Tennessee was battered by killer tornados... New Orleans is no longer safe to live in. It is that simple, and that stark. Hell and high water, one and the same again today, in a city overwhelmed... ...under siege, in the grip of unmitigated, unprecedented catastrophe. Nowhere is that more apparent than New Orleans... ...now a city of displaced people, refugees. - Twenty feet of water from Lake Pontchartrain. Add to that violence, deprivation, desperation, the threat of disease... Could it be that man-made global warming... ...is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? One of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming... ...brought about by rising levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The danger is that the temperature increase... ...might become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. Drought and deforestation are reducing the amount... ...of carbon dioxide recycled into the atmosphere. And the warming of the seas may trigger the release... ...of large quantities of CO2 trapped on the ocean floor. In addition, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets... ...will reduce the amount of solar energy reflected back into space... ...and so increase the temperature further. We don't know where the global warming would stop, but the worst-case scenario... ...is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus... ...with a temperature of 250 centigrade and raining sulfuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions. Earth has a natural greenhouse effect. We're 60 degrees Fahrenheit warmer... ...thanks to the good guys, water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane... ...what we call greenhouse gases, trapping heat. That's the good part of the story. The problem is that humans are competing with nature. When we use tail pipes and smokestacks to put our waste into the atmosphere... ...as if it's some kind of unpriced sewer... ...we're adding to the greenhouse gases that's natural, unnatural stuff. Mostly carbon dioxide, methane, chemicals that nobody's seen before... ...chlorofluorocarbons, which also affect ozone. And when they build up, they trap extra heat. That's not controversial, that's well-understood. We know we've increased carbon dioxide by about 30, 35 percent... ...methane, 150 percent... ...added gases that never existed before. And the Earth is warmer. All of that goes together and makes global warming... ...not only a reality, but a concern for the future... ...because we're continuing doing what we're doing at an accelerating rate. The record shows that greenhouse gases... ...mainly CO2, did not go above 280 parts per million... ...over the last 650,000 years. We're now over 400 parts per million... ...coming close to what many scientists are now referring to as a tipping point. A tipping point where we lose control of climate. And once we've lost control of climate... ...then things like Katrina-scale events will become simply the norm. Unless we're able to quickly reduce... ...very quickly and very dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuel... ...the computer modeling's clear. Having increased the temperature one degree... ...we'll increase it about another 5 degrees. That'll make the Earth warmer than it's been for tens of millions of years. Some scientists are amazed that in the media and in front of Congress... ...we hear about people who "I believe in" or "I don't believe in" global warming... ...as if this were somehow some object of religion, as opposed to based in evidence. And scientists look at evidence. The scientists have a tremendous amount of agreement... ...over some of the basic principals of global warming. Is the Earth warming? Absolutely. Is some portion of the warming due to human activity? Absolutely. These are things that, there's a consensus in the international scientific community. There's no doubt about that. The natural changes... The speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by human changes... ...to the atmosphere and surface. Jim Hansen, who is the director of the NASA Institute for Space Studies... ...recently gave a best estimate that was based on research done last year. And the current estimate is that the Earth has warmed up... ...by about seven-tenths of a degree centigrade. And even if we were to cap CO2... ...carbon dioxide emissions to the level they are now... ...the Earth should still warm by an additional half a degree centigrade. That's been enough to melt 20 percent of the sea ice in the Arctic. It's been enough to speed up the spin and duration of hurricanes about 50 percent. It's been enough to start the permafrost... ...beneath the tundra across the north melting. Even at the low range, a couple of degrees in the average... ...really changes things in places. There's an amplifying effect, like in the Arctic. You can feel this, the chunk that we're on, actually starting to fail a bit more. There's probably hairline cracks up towards the helos there. The human impacts... ...what's happening with global warming, climate changes... ...it is happening first and fastest in the Arctic. We're starting to see that things are happening even faster... ...than what scientists indicated. By the end of the century, perhaps even in a few decades... ...the Arctic will be quite ice-free. Well, climate change... ...is going to have a strong, fundamental impact on the global water cycle. It's going to change rainfall patterns. It's going to very likely increase our experience with floods and droughts. It's almost certainly going to change the pattern of river flows through the year. These are all very fundamental aspects of how we manage and use water. What global warming does... ...or the climate changes linked to global warming do... ...is add another dimension of uncertainty. It threatens your food security, for example, your water security... ...your sea-level security and your security against storms and hurricanes. All these things we've seen in the news. It's a national security problem in the sense... ...FIorida may be the first affected, as well as other coastal parts. More importantly than that, it's an international security problem. The UN estimates by the middle of the century... ...there may be 150 million environmental refugees... ...at any given time from climate change. What we saw with Katrina is just prologue. I just think that worse is yet to come on that front. Global warming's real and it's destructive... ...and its impacts defy the imagination. So we've got bad things happening on a lot of fronts. And Earth is hurting... ...and humans have not figured out how to change their ways... ...and we're the culprit. Global warming has taken much of our attention, as it should. But as carbon has been accumulating in the atmosphere... ...it has also been accumulating in the ocean. And as time has passed, deforestation, soil erosion, vanishing wetlands... ...and a whole host of other problems have continued unabated. We face a convergence of crises... ...all of which are a concern for life. The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere... ...is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article in the past 20 years... ...that's been published that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs, they're our climatic stability... ...forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers... ...water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity... They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life. I sat on a United Nations group called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment... ...a four-year study, biggest study ever done of ecosystems around the world. It involved over 1300 scientists from 71 countries in the world. At the end of that, in March of 2005, the final reports came in... ...and they documented this staggering destruction of ecosystems... ...and the services they perform for us around the world. We better acknowledge that the planet is seamless. For instance, the fertilizer and the pesticides... ...that are applied in the fields of the upper Midwest... ...go down the Mississippi, and 1100 miles away, there's a deadzone. The reality with air pollution is there's no away. Impacts can range from headaches, drowsiness, lethargy... ...to much more serious impacts, not only aggravating asthma, but causing it. People didn't talk about asthma decades ago. I can walk into a classroom in an elementary school... ...and ask the kids, "How many of you have asthma?" Thirty percent of the kids in the room will have their hands raised. At least 30. In some classrooms, it'll be 60 percent. There's an ocean crisis now. And the upshot is that we've taken too much out of the ocean... ...we've put too much into the ocean, too much pollution... ...and we're wrecking the edge of the ocean. We've lost 90 percent of most of the big fish... ...in half a century, so we're turning to deeper areas, further areas offshore. So between overfishing and by-catch, we're really removing millions... ...if not billions, of animals from the ocean every year. Many of them don't even become food for humans. They just are wasted. What we put into the ocean... ...millions of tons of things that aren't natural to the sea... ...they come back to us in perverse ways. Some fish concentrate these substances... ...things like mercury, heavy metals of various sorts... ...the pesticides, the herbicides. Corporations dump on equivalent... ...at the smallest, they do five million gallons per day of toxins into the bay. It's everything from benzene to acrylonitrile to mercury to copper to... You name it, they've got it. A lot of the chemicals very common in today's world: Plastics, artificial colors, pesticides... ...are really high on the list of suspect agents... ...that promote cancer, that promote premature aging... ...that increase risks of chronic degenerative diseases. Why don't we think about some of these disorders... ...such as autism, ADHD... ...childhood cancers, childhood diabetes... ...childhood behavioral problems, Parkinson's disorders. This is now even been linked with Alzheimer's disorders. And then of course we've got the early onsets of testicular cancers in males... ...the epidemic of prostate cancer and breast cancers. The list just keeps growing. And exposure to chemicals while in the womb prior to birth... ...could be contributing to these disturbing findings. The communities most impacted by pollution... ...and in fact, have the most toxic sources of pollution... ...are often low-income communities of color. They're the dumping grounds for power plants... ...for bus depots, for oil refineries... ...for any number of waste facilities, and everything that no one else wants. Whether it's the South Bronx, whether it's Louisiana, in Cancer Alley... Our food is becoming poisoned... ...to the point we should worry about it. There's less and less. The water... It's becoming more and more unhealthy to just swim in the ocean. And all of these are simple to understand... ...canaries in the coalmine... ...of much more subtle and scary disasters on the horizon. Seventy countries in the world no longer have any intact or original forests. Here in the United States, 95 percent of our old growth forests... ...are already gone. In many cases, the forest will not grow back. That land is converted to grassland. But in the case of rain forests, we have seen firsthand... ...that when those trees are removed, no, they do not come back. The land becomes extremely dry... ...and the nutrient cycling that those trees used to do is no longer functioning. What that leads to next? Deserts. We've seen them and we've watched them grow around the world. As we have removed trees from along the edges of very dry areas... ...that desertification has spread where there used to be forests. In my own part of the world... ...I keep telling people, "Let us not cut trees irresponsibly. Let us not destroy especially... ...the forested mountains. Because if you destroy the forests on these mountains... ...the rivers will stop flowing... ...and the rains will become irregular... ...and the crops will fail... ...and you will die of hunger and starvation." Now, the problem is, people don't make those linkages. Well over 30 percent of the soils of the planet... ...have been put into the category of, I think, serious degradation. And the practices of agriculture is eroding that ecological capital... ...that is as much, for all practical purposes... ...a nonrenewable resource as oil. What we don't see or think about when we look at a tree is: What's the volume? How much water is contained there? Turns out to be 57,000 gallons of water... ...in a 10- to 12-inch flash flood. It can grab that much water, prevent it from running off... ...captures it in that sponge, cleans it, puts it back in the aquifer. Take that one tree away... ...and you got a flood, you got soil erosion. You've lost those 57,000 gallons from the local water supply. Then that water is rushing downstream, hurting people, hurting communities... ...ultimately polluting the ocean. We really could tip the ocean into a different state. The health of the ocean as we know it... ...depends on the water turning over... ...of the surface water sinking to the bottom... ...and the bottom water coming up to the top. It's conceivable that we could turn that conveyor belt off... ...by warming of the surface of the ocean a little bit too much. And if we do that... ...with all of our deadzones, we could make the whole surface ocean stagnant. And that's a terrifying thought. The last time that happened was the end-Permian mass extinction... ...and more than 95 percent of all the species on the Earth went extinct. The simple fact is, ecosystems that sustain life are unraveling. Systems that have evolved for hundreds of millions of years. The evidence is now clear: Industrial civilization has caused irreparable damage... ... and our impact is only accelerating. We have lost the last 30 years in the war against global warming. The questions then arise, why aren't we responding? But more important, what are the forces that are blocking change? The greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalization. There's always been a greed factor in human civilization... ...and what has happened with the creation of corporations... ...which are the dominant institutions of our age... ...is that they have perfected that as a system. And what we literally face today is that... ...this is going to kill off our host, the planet. Today, ecosystems, forests, streams, lakes, rivers... ...they have no rights. They're property. Which means they can be bought, sold, destroyed, traded, carved up. Under this structure of law, you're either property or you're a person. And it's very clear that nature is property. And so the reason why we have these reams of documents in libraries... ...about solutions, about solar, about how to produce food in a sustainable way... ...about transportation, about changing production methods... ...and putting in place a sustainable economy that respects the planet is... ...we've lacked the authority to drive those things into law. Because in reality we have a Constitution that empowers the corporate few... ...to make decisions that trump the majority. And it has been our failure to drive real law into place... ...because we don't have the authority. We have very responsive political leaders. They're responsive to wealth, money and corporate power. ExxonMobil, one oil company... ...is worth more than the sum of the value of all the auto companies... ...in the whole wide world. That is a big company. People say: "Gee, why aren't politicians responding to the global climate crisis?" Because they respond to a higher power, unfortunately. Right now, that higher power is the fossil-fuel industry. You're responsible for editing Our Changing Planet... ...and you send a review draft to the White House. What happens? It comes back... ...with a large number of edits... ...handwritten on the hard copy... ...by the chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality. And the chief of staff is whom? Phil Cooney. He is a scientist? No, he's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute... ...before going into the White House. Our people have a growing suspicion... ...that oil companies are taking unfair advantage of current market conditions... ...to line their coffers with excess profits. On the issues of climate change and environment... ...the political system failed us. It's not first and foremost a crisis of technology... ...it isn't even a crisis of public opinion. If you ask the public, "Do you want solar energy? Do you want efficient appliances? Do you want efficient cars?" The answer is overwhelmingly, "Yes, we do." It's the bridge across this chasm... ...of public opinion to public policy. It's called government. That's where the failure has been. That bridge has fallen into disrepair. There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s... ...when Republicans and Democrats in the United States... ...joined to pass the major environmental laws. The National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act... ...the Endangered Species Act. Those were done by Republicans... ...and Democrats coming together. And that system is now broken. And part of the crisis is, as everybody knows... ...its that there is money, too much money in the political system. Even Jefferson said... ...we have to rewrite the Constitution every generation to meet our need. Do we think that the Founding Fathers understood global warming? Or deforestation? Or the massive amounts... ...of toxic chemicals that are pumped into our atmosphere... ...and into our air, water, land and soil every day? What we need to do is find a harmony between people and nature. One of the only ways to do that is to recognize that nature has rights too. I think the most basic thing to understand about our global economic system... ...is that it's a subsystem. And it's a subsystem of a larger system. The larger system is the biosphere and the subsystem is the economy. The problem, of course, is that our subsystem, the economy... ...is geared for growth. It's all set up to grow, to expand... ...whereas the parent system doesn't grow. It remains the same size. So as the economy grows, it displaces, it encroaches upon... ...the biosphere, and this is a fundamental cost. This is the fundamental opportunity cost of economic growth. That's what you give up when you expand, what used to be there. So economists don't include all of the things that nature does for us for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does. For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air... ...and put oxygen back in it, which all the green things do for us for nothing. It's possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace nature. Constanza, this is several years ago... ...estimated it would cost us $35 trillion a year... ...to do what nature is doing for us for nothing. To put that in perspective... ...if you added up all of the annual economies in the world at that time... ...it came to $ 18 trillion. So nature was doing twice as much service for us... ...as the economies of the world. And in the madness of conventional economics, this isn't in the equation. Somehow in the last few decades in business school... ...and the M.B.A. S that these CEOs have... ...they were trained that the object of their business is growth... ...as if that were an end. It's not an end, it's a means. We flipped the ends and means. If we can get the end back, quality of life... ...we look at the contradictions... ...because the wrong kind of growth reduces our quality of life... ...and we have to retake that back. I think the industrial system... ...has to be reinvented. Today, the throughput of the industrial system from mining wellhead... ...through to finished product that ends up in a landfill or an incinerator... ...for every truckload of product with lasting value... ...32 truckloads of waste are produced. And that is mind-boggling. But it's true. So we have a system that is a waste-making system. Clearly, we cannot continue to dig up the earth and turn it to waste. In our modern globalized world... ... growth continues to be the focus of many corporations and governments... ... who deplete our environment for economic gain. But what about us, as individuals, as consumers? To what extent are we participants in the destruction of our biosphere? The problem is not a problem of technology. The problem is not a problem of too much carbon dioxide. The problem is not a problem of global warming. The problem is not a problem of waste. All of those things are symptoms of the problem. The problem is the way that we are thinking. The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem. It's at the level of our culture that this illness is happening. We're now products of $500 billion of advertising each year. By the time a child comes to college or grows up through school... ...as a first-year student in college, they'll have seen thousands of hours of TV. On average, four hours and some minutes per day. As a result, as one study showed, they could identify 1000 corporate logos... ...but fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their own place. And so we've become not only consumers... ...but hugely ignorant of the terms by which we live on the Earth. Americans are spending their time working and spending. That's where our time is going. An average American goes shopping in one way or another five times a week. During the day, we spend time working to make the money so that we can shop. And there's a growing weariness of having to hold up the global economy... ...having to sort of keep up with the Joneses. So while everything's getting bigger... ...our bathtubs, our houses, our vehicles, our waistlines... ...we're running out of time. We have less of the things we really care about. In America, people are so insulated... ...by our concentration of wealth. We spend more money maintaining lawns... ...than India collects in federal tax revenue. Our defense budget, which is a trivial percentage of GDP... ...is larger than the entire economy of Australia. So anesthetized by our own wealth, we forget how most of the world lives... ...and how the majority of the world looks. So where we are now as a civilization is... I would call... Consumerism is the leading ideology. Even consumer democracy. Consumer democracy in the sense that any regime... ...whether it's the Chinese regime, the U.S. Regime... ...has to give people what they want and when they want it, which is now. And people want consumer goods. Once commodities become cultural symbols... ...whether it's a cell phone in rural China, or a Lamborghini in Malibu... ...there's no stopping that. You have to change the object of desire in order to get the root of the problem. People believe in choice, and choice means consumerism for most people. There is no mileage in trying to save the planet... ...by telling people they're making the wrong choice. It won't work. Four, three, two, one! You have to change the idea behind limitless expansion. In a phrase, from well-having to well-being. It's a cultural transformation. We've always, as humans, had material desires. Material things are part of how we do define who we are. So it's not that consumption is bad, it's that it's gotten totally out of balance. Media really is the instrument by which... ...knowledge is passed in our society. We no longer get knowledge directly from the Earth. We're no longer in touch with the sources of our survival. We no longer, for the most part, in Western industrial society... We're no longer growing our food or taking care of our own sustenance... ...or learning directly from our own experience... ...or having our family be the root of our choices. Basically, we're like the astronaut in space. You know, we're floating around in a metallic re-created universe... ...disconnected, really, from sources on the Earth. And we're dependent completely upon the information... ...that is sent to us from very, very far away. We're psychically numbed. We numb our senses from morning till night... ...whether it's with noise or loud music or light at night. So nobody sees the beauty. And if we've lost the feeling of the beauty of the world... ...then we are looking for substitutes. Eric Hoffer said, "You can never get enough of what you don't really want." Meaning we rush around permanently needy... ...but the loss, the feeling of loss, is that we don't know what it is we've lost. What we've lost is the beauty of the world... ...and we make up for it with attempting to conquer the world... ...or own the world, possess the world. One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest... ...and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet... ...is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere... ...poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available. We are living... ...in an enormously challenging time. If we don't change what we're doing... ...we are facing losing... ...perhaps a third, maybe a half, of all the variety of life on Earth. We don't know at what point when we lose biodiversity... ...that the system will start to fall apart. I believe in the resilience of nature. So I think that once the human species becomes extinct... And many species have became extinct before us, many species will after us. - That the Earth may well spin on its axis happily without humans... ...and the microbes and insects will inherit the world. Unless we cause such a dramatic climate shift... ...that we become an arid, cold planet like Mars. I don't believe for a minute that life will be extinguished. Even though we've radically altered the air, the water, and the soil of Earth... ...life has been incredibly tenacious and adaptable. But as a species at the very top of the food chain... ...I know that we're the most vulnerable. Life has existed on Earth for 3.8 to 4 billion years. Over that time, there have been a lot of species. But you know what? 99.9999... ...four decimal points, percent of all species... ...that have ever existed are extinct. So extinction is a natural part of life. Extinction is what has enabled life to flourish and evolve and change... ...with the conditions of the changing planet. The planet hasn't been stuck in one condition over 4 billion years. The tragedy of our existence is that we're an infant species. Not only are we hastening the conditions for our own demise... ...we're taking down... According to the United Nations Environment Programme... ...50 to 55,000 species a year are going extinct because of us. The tragedy is not the imminent or potential extinction of humankind... ...but the enormous extinction crisis that we're causing right now. And I think there is potential for a Dark Age. One of the problems that I see... ...is that so many people who have to individually accept... ...the cost of the transition, are unaware that it's coming. Most of our citizens wake up in the morning... ...and worry about the morning commute... ...and getting the kids to school, and paying the mortgage... ...and thinking about a new car or a vacation or whatever. This is too narrow a scale of thinking to address the problems that we have. We need people to be aware of the global forces that affect their lives... ...and that will increasingly affect their lives in the future. If this awareness doesn't develop, I'm afraid the transition will be wrenching. What we risk is... ...the destruction of civilization. All that we fought for. This fragile little craft... ...that's navigated the centuries and the millennia... ...to come to this particular point. It will have been undone in a flash of consumption... ...and bad judgment, and violence, and injustice. Is the caring capacity for a happy and healthy human population... ...in a future going away? Absolutely. And it's not about saving the planet. It's about saving a caring capacity... ...a system upon which humans can live in the pursuit of happiness. That's what's at stake. So if you step back and you take an Earth perspective rather than human... ...it can't be an 11 th hour for the Earth. It can be an extinction crisis for the Earth. And it can be a harmony crisis for the Earth. Because we now see that one species... ...is taking over so much of the resources of the Earth... ...that it's leaving very little for other creatures to live with it. So we find ourselves on the brink. It is clear humans have had a devastating impact... ...on our planet's ecological web of life. Because we have waited... ...because we've turned our backs on nature's warning signs... ...and because our political and corporate leaders... ...have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence... ...the challenges we face are that much more difficult. We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not. So what does the future look like? We know the United States, the world's greatest consumer and source of waste... ... needs to make a transition to a greener future. But will our pivotal generation create a sustainable world in time? What will guide this massive change? Does nature hold the answers we need to help restore our planet's resources... ...protect our atmosphere and, therefore, help all life survive? All these forces sweeping over the planet are the forces created by human beings. If human beings are the source of the problem... ...we can be the foundation of the solution. Some people suggest that to live sustainably... ...we have to go out in the woods and put on animal skins... ...and live on roots and berries. And the simple reality is that we do have technology. The question is: How can we use our understanding of science and technology... ...along with our understanding of culture and how culture changes... ...to create a culture that will interact with science... ...and with the world around us in a sustainable fashion? The great thing about the dilemma we're in... ...is that we get to reimagine every single thing we do. In other words, there isn't one single thing that we make... ...or systems that we have that doesn't require a complete remake. And so there's two ways of looking at that. One is, like, "Oh, my gosh. What a big burden." The other way to look at it, which is the way I prefer, is: "What a great time to be born. What a great time to be alive." Because this generation gets to essentially completely change this world. We're at a point, with 6.4 billion of us... ...that we have to imagine what it'd be like to redesign design itself... ...and see design as the first signal of human intention... ...and see we need new intentions, where materials are seen as highly valuable... ...and need to go in closed cycles, "cradle to cradle" instead of "cradle to grave. " And that energy needs to come from renewable sources, principally the sun... ...and water needs to be clean and healthy as it goes through a system... ...and we have to treat each other with justice and fairness. So the design itself changes... ...from mass production of things that are essentially destructive... ...to mass utilization of things that are inherently assets instead of liabilities. Our project today, for a new generation of designers... ...is the welfare of all of life as a practical objective. It goes beyond ourselves to include the entire ecological realm. That all of life is actually a design project today. That we have to design the capacity to sustain it in the long run. Whether we're talking about the design of a factory or a building... ...or a road or even a town... ...it's much easier to design in isolation... ...than superimpose a design on what exists. But if we were to follow nature's operating instructions... ...it designs in exactly the opposite way. It brings onto the palette, so to speak, all of the kingdoms of life... ...and then works symphonically to create an end result... ...which might be a coral reef or might be a forest. Well, you know, the interesting thing about sustainable design... ...is that I don't think it has to look in any particular way. One of the things that we discovered in the last few years... ...is the new design is actually invisible. It's not about a visual boundary. The form, in fact, could be anything. It's the structure and internal logic and intelligence... ...and the performance that has to be designed. How we make things... ...in, you know, our industrial processes... ...it's 180 degrees different from how life makes things. Look at the way we make, for instance, Kevlar... ...which is our toughest material. We take petroleum, we heat it up to about 1400 degrees Fahrenheit... ...and we bubble it in sulfuric acid... ...and then we pull it out under enormous pressures. Now imagine an organism, us, making our bones or our teeth. Imagine an abalone making a shell. They can't afford to heat it up to really high temperatures... ...or do pressures or chemical baths, so they found a different way. Now take the spider. This beautiful orb-weaver spider is taking flies and crickets into the web... ...and transforming them with chemistry in water in the abdomen... ...and out comes this material... ...that's five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel. Silently, in water, at room temp. You know? I mean, this is master chemistry. This is the manufacturing of the future, hopefully. There's actually people... ...who are now trying to mimic the recipes of these organisms. Fungi are the molecular disassemblers, the organisms between life and death. They generate soil. The entire food web of nature is based on these fungal filaments. The mycelial network that infuses all land masses in the world... ...is a supportive membrane upon which life proliferates... ...and further diversifies. Mushrooms also have a very bizarre property... ...of hyper-accumulating heavy metals. Forests are thousands of acres... ...so fungi that produce mushrooms grow to thousands of acres in size. This gives us a ready ability... ...to tap into this powerful inherent resource that mushroom mycelium has... ...to remediate environments, prevent downstream pollution... ...from microbes, from viruses, including bacteria and protozoa... ...and also for breaking down a wide assortment of pollutants. And this is one of the pedestals of mycorestoration. Using mushroom mycelium in order to heal environments... ...because these are truly healing membranes. There's the model. In nature, there is no waste. One organism's waste is another's food. That's the model for the industrial system that must eventually evolve. A waste-free industrial system. If we think about a tree as a design... ...it makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water... ...provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy... ...makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates and self-replicates. So what would it be like to design a building like a tree? What would it be like to design a city like a forest? So what would a building be like if it were photosynthetic? What if it took solar energy and converted it... ...to productive and delightful use? For example, if we combine our housing and our waste treatment... ...and our food production and energy generation... ...all integrated, single whole systems... ...we can live beautifully on the planet... ...with one tenth or less the resources... ...that our current civilization uses. Green building is essentially... ...the design and construction of buildings that are energy- and resource-efficient. They produce healthy places to live and work. If you take the fact that buildings account for a third of all energy use... ...it's the single largest segment of energy use and greenhouse gas production. What we can do with buildings... ...in just the simplest off-the-shelf technologies, is really stunning. With existing technologies that we basically already have on the shelf... ...or things we know we can develop in a rapid period of time... ...we could reduce the human footprint on planet Earth by 90 percent... ...which would be a huge shift in what we're doing now. The direction to go is to decouple from our dependence on oil... ...through efficient transportation, better-insulated houses... ...and the development of renewable alternatives like solar, wind and biomass... ...and getting those to become the major part of the market... ...using efficiency as the transition. It won't happen overnight, but it should've started 30 years ago. We have right now, in the White House and in Congress... ...people trying to delay it further, which is irrational... ...both for our national security and environmental protection. This country... ...can move awfully fast if it wants to. Keep in mind that just after December 7th, 1941... ...Roosevelt went to Jimmy Byrnes and said: "You're my deputy president for mobilizing the economy. If anybody crosses you, they cross me. Get to it." Within six months, Detroit was completely retooled, not making cars anymore... ...making military trucks, tanks, fighter aircraft. And in three years and eight months... ...from the beginning of that war, we had mobilized... ...we had defeated imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany... ...together with the British and our other allies, and begun demobilization. - Three years and eight months. - These are not technical issues... ...nearly as much as they are leadership issues. How much time do we have? Well, not much. By my reckoning, we ought to be about the business as rapidly as possible. This means everybody. Every citizen, every government level, every organization, every corporation. This is "all hands on deck" time. So that in the future, 500 years out... ...that people look back at this time, that this was our finest hour. That humans at that time in that generation all across the planet... ...came together in a very different vision. There are, on Earth today... ...over one million environmental... ...social justice and indigenous organizations present. It is the fastest growing movement on Earth. And you're starting to see them pull together... ...and close the loops and plug the leaks... ...of energy and water and food and finance and those things... ...to reimagine what it means to be... ...as I say, a human being in the 21 st century... ...when every living system is in decline, and learning how to reverse that. It's almost as if we had... ...distributed an ambition without ever having written it down. So that people all over the world knew what they ought to be working on... ...and were working on it in their own way... ...knowing they only had one sort of pixel... ...in this incredible mosaic of an image of the future. And that they could contribute that pixel to that mosaic... ...knowing that in the end... ...that incredibly beautiful image was a sustainable future. The exciting thing is that we can see now what the new economy would look like. Instead of being powered by fossil fuels, it's powered by renewable energy. Instead of having an automobile-centered transportation system... ...it will have a much more diversified transport system. Instead of a throwaway economy... ...it will be a reused economy, where everything is reused. Indeed, we see glimpses of it emerging here and there around the world. So we have technologies to build a new economy to sustain economic progress. We can see that new economy emerging. The challenge for our generation is to build that economy in the available time. And I don't think we have a lot of time left. Virtually all of our major infrastructure changes... ...have been encouraged in some way by the government. So I would think the way to deal... ...with this transition away from oil is... ...not to pretend energy operates in an unregulated free enterprise market. It does not. But to go ahead and, as affordably as possible... ...give incentives to move toward these other fuels... ...and these minimal changes in infrastructure that make them possible. Energy is the key to everything else we do. With abundant, affordable and clean energy, we can solve a lot of problems. Without it, we won't be able to solve very many problems at all. The sun is the most plentiful, bountiful substitute there is. There's more than enough energy coming from the sun every day... ...to run every factory, every home, every automobile on Earth 13,000 times, I think. We're also finding that on the larger scale... ...what we'd call the utility scale, wind energy has evolved to the point... ...where it can compete price-wise with our traditional fossil fuels... ...that is, coal and oil and natural gas... ...and produce large amounts of energy that can be distributed through the grid... ...which is the conventional way that we receive energy. It's important to see, as we make progress in the world... ...to have an economy that's flexible, fluid and ready to make changes. How do we protect the atmosphere that belongs to us all? One of the ways is we make people who are polluting... ...start paying for that pollution through a polluter pay system on climate change. So we lower income taxes... ...and raise taxes on gasoline, for example, taxes on burning coal. We could probably do it all with a carbon tax. We're not changing the level of taxes. We're reducing income taxes... ...and offsetting it with an increase in energy taxes, in effect. A tax on fossil fuels. When we break our addiction to fossil fuels... ...you see money flowing to industries that represent the vitality of the economy: Media, high-tech, services. Taking action on climate change is good for jobs and the economy. If we retrofitted... ...all government buildings built pre-1950... ...and we created tax environments to help cities and municipalities... ...and states and the federal government to retrofit those buildings... ...we could create 3 million industrial jobs. Plus we could import much less oil from the Middle East. But more importantly, we'd be having a much cleaner environment. If we move from the rigged game we have now in energy... ...to a level playing field, competition between dirty and clean fuels... ...I have no doubt the clean fuels will win. Once we send the right signal to the marketplace... ...that the two guys in the garage who created Hewlett-Packard... Those two guys today, I want them working on clean energy. I want them to know we fixed our public policies... ...so they'll be rewarded when they come up with a killer app to defeat Big Oil. That's what we need to do. Once we do, we'll see a relatively quick transition to cleaner energy. People need to realize they can do things in their everyday lives. Keeping tire pressure at the right level... ...putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs. Personal action is important. This problem of global warming is huge and tremendous... ...and it may seem inconsequential to take your personal action... ...but it is important for many reasons. Because everybody making a change... ...adds up to something meaningful. Because shifting the way we act and live is part of the solution, long-term. Because if we act in that way, we will demonstrate to leaders that we do care. That's what we need from individuals... ...as the next step beyond that, is to build a political will for taking action. You can also vote. And I don't mean voting at a voting booth. Anybody of any age can vote. Because you vote every day that you pay for something. Every time you lay money down on a counter to buy something... ...you are saying that, "I approve of this object. I approve of how it was made, the materials that are in it... ...and what's going to happen to it when I no longer need it and throw it away." Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. So our technology, our cities, our schools... ...what we make, what we wear, what we eat, all of that... ...if it is oriented around that one principle... ...that one life principle... ...then we will be here for a long, long time in an extraordinary world. The question is, what does it take for humankind to change its ways? And I am really encouraged by Deepak Chopra's statement... ...that people are really doing the best they can given their level of awareness. So to me, winning this battle that we're in... ...to change people's minds and hearts... ...is a matter of lifting levels of awareness. Always raising. And there's always a higher level of awareness for any of us. We need to be slower, and we need to be smarter. Slow movement means disengaging from consumerism... ...as the main avenue of experience. It doesn't reject any consumption, but it says: "We're not gonna live our lives mediated by the marketplace or what's being sold. We won't make our identities and meaning based on that. Instead of the long commute, the bigger car, the bigger house... ...let's enjoy the local produce, have time to ourselves... ...understand that things are thieves of time." Because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working... ...the more your life is chained to a rhythm to get those things. The other element is the smart element. And there I think we have to reintroduce a term... ...an old term before the industrial revolution, frugality. Frugality does not mean poverty. Frugality means the wise use of resources. As I said earlier on, the meaning of the industrial revolution was... ...that nature was turned into a resource that was considered endlessly abundant. It's not true. Not only is it the 11 th hour, it's 11:59 and 59 seconds. And although prior people's movements... ...have taken 30 to 40 years to build to a point where they had the power... ...to drive changes into the fundamental structure of governance... ...we don't have 30 to 40 years. It's not just gonna be a matter of tweaking a policy here and there. It'll take a broad societal mobilization. It's gonna take involvement at all levels... ...from the government through industry and on down to our communities... ...and a welling up of involvement of citizens. Winston Churchill had it right about us: "The Americans always do the right thing... ...but unfortunately, it's only after they've exhausted all other possibilities." And we've been exhausting some fairly bad possibilities for a long time. I think maybe we're finally ready to get it right. People often ask: "What can I do? I wanna do something." You made the first choice because you know you have to do something. For the rest, it's a matter of looking deep into your own heart and your soul... ...to understand what your gifts are, where your passions lie... ...to do some research, educate yourself... ...to find the people you're comfortable with, and then get involved. There are two things that can perhaps save the world. One would be the mastery of one's kindness to oneself and a big heart. And the other would be understanding your passion for place... ...for where you live, and really loving the place that you live in. Environmentalism was once the project of a passionate few. Now, millions of people have responded to ecological destruction... ...and have created the groundwork for a sustainable and just world. With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events... ...environmentalism has become today a broader unifying human issue. We as citizens, leaders, consumers and voters... ...have the opportunity to help integrate ecology... ...into governmental policy and everyday living standards. During this critical period of human history... ...healing the damage of industrial civilization is the task of our generation. Our response depends on the conscious evolution of our species... ...and this response could very well save this unique blue planet... ...for future generations. So I see a world in the future... ...in which we understand that all life is related to us... ...and we treat that life with great humility and respect. I see us, as well, as social creatures. And when I began to look back and say: "What is the fundamental bottom line for us as social creatures?" I couldn't believe it because it seemed so hippie-dippie, but it was love. Love is the force that makes us fully human. Now, to me, the value... ...is the healing power that comes from getting... ...that it's not just global warming. It's not just fossil-fuel dependency. It's not just soil erosion. It's not just chemical contamination of our land and water. It's not just the population problem. And it's not just all of those. The deterioration of the environment of our planet... ...is an outward mirror of an inner condition. Like inside, like outside. And that's a part of the great work. What if we choose to eradicate ourselves from this Earth, by whatever means? The Earth goes nowhere. And in time, it will regenerate... ...and all the lakes will be pristine. The rivers, the waters, the mountains... ...everything will be green again. It'll be peaceful. There may not be people, but the Earth will regenerate. And you know why? Because the Earth has all the time in the world... ...and we don't. So I think that's where we're at, right now. Subtitles by SDI Media Group [ENGLISH]