– All right, so, I’m not a chemist, I can’t make anything light up, and I can’t blow anything up, which is much to my consternation throughout my entire career. I would much prefer to be able to show you something that spectacular. When Dr. Shakhashiri asked me to speak here on the topic of sustainability, I was flabbergasted. In part because that term is either the most important term of the 21st century or the most incoherent and impossible to use. Or both. So what I’m gonna try to do is express, in a really grounded example, what sustainability is. I mean, defined as kind of a normative objective, like, we want to be sustainable, that’s really about achieving the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. I mean, that’s good ethics.

That’s a sound normative goal. It’s what most people who believe in the stewardship of the Earth want to practice, but it is sure easier said than done. In other words, what are we supposed to do if we want to achieve both outcomes at the same time? Feed everybody. Keep the lights on. Turn the lights on. 800,000,000 people in Africa are going to have electricity within the next decade. How they get it is a really, really interesting question. These are people who currently do not have electricity. They don’t have refrigerators.

They don’t have anything. So let me see if I can think a little bit about what achieving the now and achieving the future might look like. If I threw you out of helicopter in southern India, hopefully you had a parachute, and dumped you in the southern Ghats or the Western Ghats in the southern part of the country, so it’s at the southern tip of India. I’ll show you a map in a moment. It’s hilly country up here. You can see it, about 900 meters, deeply forested. I drop ya in there. What are you gonna see? You’re gonna wander around, assuming you haven’t broken you legs. You’re gonna slash your way through the undergrowth, and you’re gonna find lots of endemic species.

You’re gonna find trees and plants. You’re gonna feel like you’re out, you know, in nature. That’s my colleague, Dr. Ashwini Chhatre, here in the region. You’re gonna to see a lot of wildlife, as I’m gonna show you, you’re gonna hear birds. How many birders do we have here? Anybody a birder? Sort of? Usually these places are packed with birders. Okay, well, you’d hear birds.

You wouldn’t know what they are. But you’d feel like, you know, nature, right? If you were there at night in the middle of a rainstorm, you would hear frogs, you would hear amphibians. You would see all kinds of wildlife. And you could wander for miles seeing all this wildlife. But if you ever looked at your feet, statistically, you are very likely to see the following. Just as a random sample, and what is that?

Any guesses? That’s coffee. Thousands of square kilometers of coffee.

Thousands of square kilometers of rubber. Thousands of square kilometers of what is called areca nut, which you chew and you get a little buzz off of. This is a export oriented, capitalist economy. Driving onto the, you go to the store and you buy coffee, you might have Indian coffee in there. If you are driving on tires, you probably have Indian rubber. Hand-tapped Indian rubber from south India. This is a booming economy. This is a growing economy. And yet, right, it’s fecund with wildlife.

That strikes me as a core example of what you might call sustainability.

That is, in other words, something’s happening in the present without, in theory, compromising the future. The biodiversity of the Earth, the sustainability of Earth’s systems. If you’ve got frogs, quite frankly, it means you probably have good water quality. It means you probably have ecosystem services, as they’re called. That is, things that the ecosystem, when it’s healthy, produces for wildlife, means it’s producing for the Earth. All right? Sustainability in a very grounded example. That is a hell of a lot more useful than this definition. It’s one of my favorites, but this is classic science writing. So, this is a definition of sustainability science.

And I only want you to look at the words I’ve bolded. This is just my way of saying, “Yeah, there’s some clever scientists who agree with me,” right? The three key words are integration, mitigate, and future. See those? Integration means, if you’re thinking about sustainability, the needs of the present, you’ve gotta think about what? I mean, think about the Indian example. What do you have to think about in the present?

What are those folks living down there in India thinking about? What’s that? Sorry.

–

[Audience]

Food.

– Food. They have to put food on the table. They’re either growing it themselves or they’ve gotta sell coffee to buy it. They’re thinking about food. What else are they thinking about? They’re thinking about water. Some of these coffee plantations are irrigated.

They’re thinking about water. They are thinking about the now, right? But that also means they’re thinking about the economy. They’re thinking about what they can bear on the market, right, when they sell their coffee. They are thinking about their family. They’re thinking about the social relationships with their neighbors, they’re thinking about how much they have to pay their workers. In other words, if you’re gonna think about sustainability, you have to be integrated. You need to be thinking about economics. You need to be thinking about social relationships. You need to be thinkin’ about frogs.

As it turns out, none of these farmers actually give a damn about frogs, sadly. But they protect them accidentally. And we’re gonna come back to that in just a minute. The point is it needs to be integrated. To understand what’s going on for the future, you have to do a lot. Am I too loud? He’s covering his ears, I’m so concerned. Oh, okay, as long as you’re all right. Two, mitigate. What does it mean to mitigate?

It means that we know we have a presence on the Earth, right, humanity has a hand on the Earth that transforms Earth’s systems. There is no getting around it. When we’re done with population growth, and I’m a little more optimistic than Bassam here, we’ll be about 9,000,000,000 people on the Earth. That is nothin’ to sneeze at. Maybe 10,000,000,000. When growth stops at the middle of this century. That’s still a lot of people, right? You can’t not impact the Earth. Climate change is the signature of human industry. Like it or not.

We are present on the Earth. How do we mitigate that presence in a way that we can sustain the future, right? That’s the second word, right? So, integrate, mitigate, and the third one is future. That the sustainability people are always thinkin’ about the future. All right, what does that look like? In practice, most sustainability experts talk about this as the triple bottom line. It’s not a term I particularly like. But you can see what they’re trying to get at with this diagram. If you look up here, what you’re seeing is that you’re trying to sustain economy.

Whether or not you need economic growth is a debatable question, but you’re trying to sustain the economy. These farmers aren’t going to do things that make them poor, broke, or can’t send their kids to school, right? They’re not stupid, they’re smart. So they’re thinkin’ about the economy. At the same time, we have to think about environmental stewardship. If we blow all the water resources in the now, we won’t have it in the then, right? So you’re thinking about environmental stewardship, but you’re also thinking about social progress. This is a nation of more than a billion people that have aspirations. They want access to the science and technology that is their human right, right? All three of those things.

And we’d like to think that if we could just get one, the other two would just kind of sort themselves out. If we just saved the planet, why, everybody would be developed. Or if we just built the economy big enough, then the environment would be saved. But the truth is, it’s harder than that. There are trade-offs and there are relationships. So what I’m gonna do with the remainder of the time here is just show you a grounded example, it’s all pictures, from India about what those trade-offs look like. When you’re trying to defend an economy, right, an export oriented economy and, at the same time, you’re thinking about biodiversity and social progress. That is, the rights of working people around the world. So we’ll go back to our example. And the example takes place amidst, and this is the last word I’ll throw at you, an era that many scientists, including geologists, stratigraphers most specifically, the people who study the Earth’s strata, right, the layers of rock and soil, they call this the Anthropocene.

It’s a debated term. But it means a geologic era that succeeds the Holocene, that comes after the Holocene, in which we simply admit that the human footprint is actually in the Earth’s geology. When did it start, 10,000 years ago? Did it start 200 years ago? Did it start in the 1950s with nuclear weapons? These are debates that stratigraphers are actually having right now, right. They’re actually debating in closed rooms whether or not to rename our geologic era the Anthropocene. But my point about putting this slide up is simply to say that it is contested. Think about that. We’re trying to sustain the future in a world that’s actually changing.

It’s like a moving target. That’s enormously difficult. It’s very, intimidatingly difficult. We have climate change, we have new ecosystems, we have altered geomorphology, we have altered biogeochemistry, and this causes lots of very smart scientists to disagree with one another. In the bottom left, we have a series of conservation biologists who say the world is basically coming to an end.

(laughs)

That we need to get people off the land, in a sense. In the upper right, you have a journalist, an Emma Maris, who has interviewed other scientists, who says, actually, you know what? We’re gardening the planet, we might as well just admit it. We have this heavy hand.

We should just make responsible, creative choices. This is a very divisive debate. And it is the fundamental question in sustainability. So let’s go to my case example that I’ll kind of close out the conversation with here. And this comes from National Science Foundation funded research that I’m doing with my colleagues in India and around the country. And it’s a very simple question. If we go back to those coffee plantations, we go back to those rubber plantations, we’re gonna ask ourselves a really simple question: is there nature there? Is there biodiversity? When do you get that biodiversity? When is the landscape fecund with all this wildlife, and when is it basically a desert?

Because if you go from one coffee plantation to another to another, what you’re going to find is some seem to be really productive and some don’t. And if you’re interested in sustainability, right, you’re interested in what it is that causes people to manage the land in a way that produces all that biodiversity for the future. Why do they do it? Why, ’cause like I said, there’s not money in frogs, I can tell you. There’s money in coffee. So that’s the project. Pictures. This is a map here. I don’t think I’ve got a laser pointer here.

(someone speaks off mic)

There’s one here? Is that this guy?

(excited exclamation)

So the southern Ghats, this is the southern tip of India, down here, like this. Pakistan is up here. Myanmar, Burma, is over here. This is the southwestern part. This is the Western Ghats. Those little brown splotches that you see there are tiger reserves or nature parks. What’s the one thing you notice about this?

Most of the land is not in protected areas. Most of the land, right, is owned by people. Private owners who grow stuff for the market, right. Most of the landscape, and we’ve made a lot of new parks in India, but frankly, in the end, what happens outside the parks is more important than what happens inside the parks. That’s true in the U.S. It’s true in India. It’s true everywhere. That’s where sustainability has to happen. We can’t make the entire Earth a nature park, right. People have to live somewhere. Okay, so we’re out here with our colleagues from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Center for Wildlife Studies, and we’re just tryin’ to figure out, in this particular region in southwestern Karnataka, where we see wildlife.

We wanted to do fauna, it’s very hard to, this is like an animal assembled by committee. It’s the strangest lookin’ thing. We’re not counting these. We’re mostly counting birds and frogs because they’re easier to find and because they are indicative of ecosystem health, right. So if we’ve got lots of birds and we’ve got lots of frogs, we know something’s goin’ right. Something’s going on sustainably. I won’t get down into this except to say that it’s wet down here on the left side and dry on the right, which is why 30% of the biodiversity of southern Asia is right here in this one region. So this is a, “Why rob banks?” Why rob banks? ‘Cause that’s where the money is.

Why count birds and frogs down here? ‘Cause it’s where all the biodiversity is, okay. So, we’re lookin’ for it in the right place. This is what it looks like at elevation. You see forest, you see open grasslands. This is very human influenced. It’s an Anthropocene landscape. People have totally remade this landscape. And what do we see? Thousands of square kilometers of coffee.

Thousands of square kilometers of rubber. And of areca nut. What’s really interesting, like rubber, I had never gone, this is a new project for me. I didn’t know people still grew rubber. 1/4 of the rubber that you encounter is actually hand-tapped in India or southeast Asia. It’s a remarkably enormous global economy. This is what coffee looks like. The coffee’s growing down under here. Here we have silver oak, which is actually not even an indigenous species. Most of these land holdings are really small.

These are small producers, they’re not poor, but they’re not like big global corporations, right. This is mom and pop operations, okay. Here’s what rubber looks like, that’s hand-tapped. You can see they score the side of the tree. And then the sap, right, the latex, runs into these. It is flattened out, dried, and then sold on a market. And this is a huge global market. There are certain products that can only be made with hand-tapped rubber. So this is a big economy. And this is areca nut.

There’s a nut, it’s a palm, it grows way up here. You cut it down, you grind it up. And you chew it, and you get a little head buzz. It’s a big business. Okay. This is the science part. Our question is very simple. When you see biodiversity, what are farmers doing? What are they doing? And if you see farmers doing stuff that produces biodiversity, why do they do it?

Is it because they get good farm gate prices? Is is because they’re in cooperatives? What makes people do the things that we desire if we wanna see sustainability? Right, knowing that there’s no money in frogs, why would you have frogs then? What would produce that effect? And to find that out, it means you have to sample hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plantations all throughout the southern part of this country. And it is a pain in the butt. We have bird count points where you go out into the forest, you get a random spot, and then you develop a series of orthogonal spots or sampling sites inside the plantation. And you stand there for three days in a row at dawn and dusk and you listen and you count the birds. And the people who do this are incredibly talented.

We have 11 volunteers and six interns. Hundreds of people apply to join this science project, actually. And then they have to take a test to identify the birds. And they all say they’re really good at birds. And most of them just do not pass the test. I couldn’t pass this test. To get into this club, you’ve got to be able to identify hundred of birds species by ear. It’s quite remarkable. And then also take other kinds of measurements on the landscape to control for various variables. The point is, did we find birds?

You better believe it. We found enormous biodiversity in these fully productive landscapes. Birds, for those of you who do like birds, the southern Ghats is a great place to take a week. And just go up to one of these coffee plantations. Get yourself into a hammock with a bird book and a camera and a glass of wine. And you’re good, you know, for days on end. We’re seeing a lot of endemic species, but also migratory species. So, all these really important Asian species that migrate all the way from Siberia down to Sri Lanka are passing through coffee and rubber and areca. And they need it, it’s habitat. They are thriving, not in spite of what people are doing, but because certain people are doing something.

What are they doing, what are they doing? It’s a great question, it’s a science question. You gotta go find out, it’s an empirical question. More birds. Lots of ’em. The Asian paradise flycatcher. Just fabulously beautiful birds. Are we seeing lots of species? Yes. Rubber is among the– And this was quite a surprise, we figured this would be a desert.

We are seeing, in a highly productive industrial landscape, lots of species. And rubber also produced the highest number of migrant species. So those flying birds that come down from Asia all the way to there, depending, in other words, at least on whatever habitat is being created artificially. And this is like science stuff. But the key, what these diagrams show you is that different types of birds like different types of landscapes. So if they eat fruits, they like certain places. And if they like bugs, they like different kinds of places. The point here is these are guilds of birds. This is biodiversity. This is conservation biology.

But usually, where do you do conservation biology if you’re a conservation biologist? Where do you do it, if you’re, like, a science person? A woman or man who studies conservation biology. Where do you go?

Where do you think you go? You go to wilderness. You go to the last five places with a fence around them. What’s crazy here is that we’ve got conservation biologists out marching around in areas that are really fully anthropogenic, created by humanity. And then amphibian sampling, much harder. It has to be done in the middle of the night.

It has to be done during the rainy season. And it has to be done in coffee plantations that are like 45 degree slopes. And that is why we have graduate students.

(audience laughter)

These guys are really good, all right. And they are out there all night, all season, tromping around in the mud, and they’re listening, right. They’re identifying these species by ear that when they find them, they turn over the leaf and they give us a photographic record of the diversity they see. And what are we seeing? We are seeing gliding frogs. We are seeing weirdly adapted endemic species.

We are seeing south Asia’s smallest frog, right. Teeming in these ponds, where, as it turns out, there’s very few pesticides that are used. That turns out to be the big kicker here. We are seeing a frog here that was actually rediscovered in 2000. This was considered extinct, and we were finding them in large numbers. Where? Again, in a human-made world. And finally, this is our prized frog. This was new to science in 2008. We didn’t discover it, but somebody else did in 2008, and it’s critically endangered species.

And we’re finding it where? Not out in the wilderness. We’re finding it in a sustainably managed landscape. All right? So, what are people doing that produces this effect? I’ll tell you that the main thing that predicts whether you’re going to have bird diversity is the diversity of your trees. Some places have much more thick canopy. Others have much more open canopy. Both of these are coffee plantations, right. Some places have lots of different tree species.

And some plantations have just basically a monoculture. That means one type of tree species. This, again, is silver oak imported by the British during the colonial era. This is gonna give you more birds than this, according to our study, right. We think that’s a statistically defensible claim, all right. And then whether you have these weird kind of ground covers also makes a big difference for frogs and stuff. So farmers are making decisions that are producing wildlife, but they’re not doing it to produce wildlife. So why the heck are they doing it? I’m coming to the end here. To answer that, you can’t count frogs.

Sustainability science is integrated science. So that means we have to talk to actual people. And we talked to 1,000 plantation owners and asked them why the heck they do what they do. And I can tell you the one thing that did not predict whether people had biodiversity or not is their education level. This guy has got a master’s degree in agronomy. This guy does not have a grade school education. And there’s everything in between. And some of them are producing biodiversity and some of them aren’t. And education doesn’t seem to be the reason. So, what is going on?

Why, when, in particular, are they opening up the canopy, which is bad for birds, or reducing the diversity of trees, which is bad for birds, for example? Our prediction was farm gate prices, the economy. So, again, sustainability science can’t just be about the sociology of the farmers. And it can’t just be about the birds. It can’t be about the frogs. We’d have to actually understand the coffee economy. What is this? This shows two different kinds of coffee. Arabica is the expensive coffee that you get when you’re at Starbucks. Robusta coffee is the stuff that you get in instant coffee.

There’s a real quality difference. This stuff is easy to produce. And it’s produced in large quantities. This is much fussier, requires more tree species diversity. It’s harder to make. If the price of arabica coffee goes down far enough, this is what this diagram is telling you, it’s in my interest as a coffee grower to just abandon arabica and say, “To hell with it, I’m gonna grow robusta.” And what would that mean? Now I don’t have to keep the diversity of tree species, now the canopy can open up, and what happens? My biodiversity goes down. So they’re responding to markets.

That’s the one thing. And the second thing they told us, and this is the key finding, and I’m almost done, the second thing they told us is workers these days are too damn lazy. Back in my father’s day when my father owned this plantation, workers would work 12 hours without a cigarette break and they wouldn’t complain. And now, you know, they want cigarette breaks. They want electricity in their homes. They want healthcare, you know. They wanna be human beings, in other words. And they’ve got the power, for the first time in history, to walk away from those plantation owners if those plantation owners don’t deliver the goods. That is, they can just walk, which means these workers are getting, in other words, higher wages, right. There’s a labor economy which determines whether or not you can have biodiversity of trees, which determines whether or not your plantation is, essentially, sustainable for the future.

So this is my last question. How is it that workers today can walk away from a plantation in India, when they couldn’t in the last generation? When those guys fathers ran the plantation?

How can they do it now that they couldn’t do it before? It’s a great mystery to me, and I was quite surprised when we learned what it was.

Let’s think about supply and demand. Think about economics. Got a guess?

How can they command a higher wage?

–

[Audience]

There’s not as many of them?

– There’s not as many of them. In fact… Labor, and this gives you a sense of what labor looks like on some of these farms, this guy will go up here in the morning at 8:00 AM. He’ll harvest, and he won’t come down until 3:00 PM. So, he just goes from tree to tree cutting down areca nut. And it cuts down, this guy bags it down here, and she works her tail off to kind of process it and then move it along. This is labor demanding stuff. This is back-breaking work, right?

But look, through all of the southern part of India, which is where we are, the fertility rate, that’s the average number of children that a woman has in their lifetime, has fallen underneath two. It’s been underneath two for over a generation. If your fertility rate is under two on average, what’s happening to the population? It’s declining, it’s declining. It’s happening, it’s happening in our lifetime. And it means we’re running, stick with me on this, we’re running out of workers in India. This is the most counterintuitive finding I’ve ever seen in my life. Now, some of it is that they’re moving to cities. Fast urbanization is going on. Some of it is that they’re going to the Gulf states to take higher paying work in places like the United Arab Emirates and other places that need labor.

But some of it is, you know what, there’s just not as many this generation as there was before. Something big is happening, right. So let’s walk through, as I conclude, what we kind of learned about sustainability. If we’re thinking about the future, preserving biodiversity, preserving water resources, using fewer chemicals, right. We’re thinking about the future, all right. That depends on the farm economics of people involved in a global capitalist economy, like the decisions they make. And those decisions are predicated on things they can’t control, like the price of coffee and the price of labor. And those things are in turn controlled by global forces that are so mysterious and almost optimistic in the case of population decline, that sustainability science, that is to predict or control the future, really means we think about some big fundamental drivers that drive a lot of what happens in the world. We can tell those farmers, “Don’t do that, that’s bad,” or, “Go do that, that’s good.” But a lot of their decisions are situated within a cycle of vast churning global drama.

And part of it is the decline of population, which I think is one of the most interesting things I’ve, and let me tell you somethin’, I did not see it coming until it came up in the surveys and until we looked at labor prices. And that’s why you do science. ‘Cause you don’t know before you start. And when you do, the light goes on. And you say the future of the planet, right, rests in the hands of what those poor people want. Where they want to move. What they want to achieve in their lives. So, if there’s a lesson for sustainability, if I close, the lesson for sustainability is the future of the planet sits in the hands of a large number of very poor people who want to have a dignified life. And the conditions under which they do or do not get it will determine how the economy functions. Which will determine how people perform on the land, what kinds of land uses, agriculture, mining, other kinds of practices.

And those things will determine the number of species, the rate of climate change. All the things that we think of as fundamental to sustaining the future are in the hands of the aspiring global poor. Which is either really good news or really bad news. And I’m glad I’m just young enough to be, I think I’m gonna be alive when population growth ends. And I wonder what it’s gonna look like. So those are my remarks, and I will take Q and A.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Paul, thank you.

(audience applause)

– Is that okay? Was that all right for time? I tried to hustle it.

–

[Shakhashiri]

We have a microphone. So we will take the microphone to the person who is going to make a comment. And let me start by asking a question.

–

[Paul]

Please.

–

[Shakhashiri]

So the fertility rates that you showed were localized.

– Well, they’re by state. So the stats that you’re seeing there are by state. So you can see the northern part of the country…

–

[Shakhashiri]

Is different.

–

[Paul]

…where I worked for a long time has much higher rates. Bahar, for example, which is just about the poorest state in the country.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Right, so the rationale for the people moving up north is what, why–

–

[Paul]

Well, they’re not moving. So just to be clear, the fertility rate is natural growth. So this is the number of kids people are having. That’s regardless of migration. So, in other words, these numbers, when you go between 1.5 and two, which is the entire southern part of the country, that is fertility choices made by women and their families. People are not having two kids. Now, why is that? And there’s a science for this too. It’s because the opportunity costs are higher to have kids, because you can be in the workforce. When women have the opportunity to work, they tend to have fewer kids.

This is just how it is, it’s a global fact. When women are educated, they tend to have fewer kids. It’s a statistical, It’s one of the cleanest, like, R-squareds that exists in national income accounting. Fertility rates go down with women’s education even in poor countries. You educate women, you have the availability of rural healthcare so that there’s lower infant mortality, so babies don’t die, and you know what you get? Fewer kids. So that what you’re seeing in India here is that the south, generally speaking, has better rural healthcare. It has higher rates of literacy in the female population, more women in the workforce. Hell, if you go out in Kerala in the morning, let’s say that you want to see elephants, which is awesome, by the way, you should go to Kerala to see elephants. You get up in the morning and you say to your hotel person, “I want to go see elephants.”

Who is the hotel person? Who actually takes your order? It’s a woman. You go out, you get in a cab, probably a man, maybe a woman driver, but they get you out to the park, Somebody takes your money, who is it? It’s a woman. You get in the boat. They fire up the motor. This is in Kerala, right. And who’s drivin’ the boat? It’s a woman.

So you can go the whole day and see only women at work. Whereas, up in Rajasthan, where I worked for 20 years prior, you could go all day without seeing a woman, right. It is a remarkable difference. It’s a natural experiment, right. This is sustainability science. What’s happening is a revolution. A fertility revolution around the world. Indonesia, throughout all of Asia, it already happened in Latin America, populations are declining in rates of growth.

These populations are actually declining in overall population. That’s before we talk about migration.

One of our big mysteries, to answer your question with our biggest question, is why the heck aren’t people from Bahar rushing down in here to the coffee plantations to pick up the labor burden? We haven’t figured that out yet. People don’t want to pick coffee? Back-breaking work. And hard to automate. Next question, go ahead.

–

[Audience]

I have a question. Can you give us an example, take us to a different part of the world here, during this biodiversity, but is not nearby very valuable agricultural product?

And because of those factors, you don’t have the same conditions where labor is so high priced.

–

[Paul]

That’s a great point.

–

[Audience]

Because this is a very

(mumbles)

.

– Well, what I say about the example, it’s a great point.

So I concede half the point. The point is this, right: this is a very specific kind of economy. This is agroforestry. There is about a hundred or a thousand times as much land under agroforestry around the world than there is in national parks. That’s my answer. In other words, you want to save biodiversity, after parks, your next best shot? Agroforestry and you find it in west Africa and you find it in southeast Africa and you find it throughout Latin America and you find it throughout Central America. You find it throughout parts of the Amazon. In other words, right, it’s the frontier. It’s a godsend, right.

Is it everywhere? Is an Iowa cornfield as biodiverse as these places? No, of course not. But how much of this is out there? So much, so much. And if you consider how much money and time is put into protected areas just in India, to say nothing of China, when it could actually be put in trying to maintain and support biodiversity in working landscapes that are actually generating an income, why, it seems like money poorly spent. So my point here is not to say that these are, it depends on how you look at it. The glass is quite half full. There’s a lot of agroforest. Now, if we go beyond agroforest, because that’s what this is about and this is what we’re publishing on, there’s also biodiversity to be found in cities.

There’s biodiversity to be found even at the edges of Iowa cornfields. In the corners in central pivot agriculture, a huge amount of work is going in now to maintaining or restoring pollinators, right. The interstices of the Anthropocene, those little spaces between what is clearly, like, pounded by humans and what is wild, which is hardly anything left, those spaces in between which are funky and lively and diverse but obviously influenced by people, those are countless, that’s the future. That’s the Earth. When there’s 10,000,000,000 people on the Earth, it is gonna be a lightly used planet. Like it or not. I’d like to think we’d all go back to 2,000,000,000 people, but we’re not. But we’re going to stop growing around 10. for all the reasons I just showed you.

(someone speaks off mic)

Yeah, well, it depends on who you cite. And demographers, you know, are pretty good at what they do, but prediction is really difficult, as they say famously, especially when it comes to the future. So, who is that who said that? Somebody smart. I want to think it’s Yogi Berra, but I think it was actually a scientist. Anyway. Niels Bohr, actually, I think. Go ahead.-

[Audience]

Do land access issues impact the study?

–

[Paul]

Do they what? I’m sorry.

–

[Audience]

Do land access issues impact the study?

– So, land change in this area, and that’s really important in Latin America, you know, in this area, by the way, great question, and we were curious ourselves, So what we’ve done is we’ve gone back and taken a look at how much land has changed hands, whether there’s consolidation, in other words, stuff like that, over the last 30 years, and there’s none. If you got your hands on this land right when the British left, let’s say you had one hectare, I mean a tiny area, two hectares, you didn’t let it go. You didn’t let it go.

Somebody in the family is still managing that land. So what I would say is that everybody who had access to the land continues to have access to the land. There hasn’t been a lot of putting people off the land. That is not true in West Africa. That’s not true in Latin America. That would become a much bigger deal in a different context. But the remarkable thing about this place is how stable it is in terms of land holdings. And it has to do with their ability to make a living and to diversify their livelihoods. I’ll give you a good case example. Almost everybody here keeps what’s called a homestay, which basically is a bed and breakfast.

You can be a little owner or you can be a big plantation owner, but you’re always gonna make a few more bucks if somebody comes out, sits in that hammock, has that glass of wine, photographs those birds. That’s worth as much as rubber, right? That’s worth as much as coffee. Who were all the people sitting in those hammocks? Let’s just get into a little more sustainability. It doesn’t answer your question, but I’m riffin’ here. Who sits in those hammocks? Who are the tourists?

–

[Audience]

Yeah, I understand that one of the biggest forces going on in the world is urbanization. And I’m not quite getting how that force toward cities is going to deal with sustainability.

– Great question. So, in this context, and I’ll be quite specific about, I’m wanna say something very specific and I’m wanna say something very general, because it’s the most important question. In this case, urbanization rate in Karnataka is about 35%. So, in other words, 35% of the population lives in something defined as a city, which means a lot of people still live out on the landscape. And, in fact, if we get to about 10,000,000,000 people, you can do this on the back of an envelope, and you’ve got about, let’s say we do 80% urbanization globally, which would be optimistic, I mean, if you like cities. That’s a high rate, but let’s say you get to 80%. The same number of people living in rural areas now will be living in rural areas then, because it’s 20% of a much larger number. So, that’s the first answer to the question is that what happens in the countryside really still matters, right.

There is a more general point, and that’s this: much of the income that’s coming in onto these landscapes that allows them to be sustainable, when they can be sustainable, is coming, as I mentioned, from tourists. Who are those tourists, to answer my own question? They are middle class Indians working in the software industry. Urbanization has provided an economic engine which has flown money back to the countryside, which has allowed certain kinds of choices which can be sustainable. And, if I can make a more abstract global argument, I think it’s pretty clear that an 80% urbanization rate is good for global sustainability. Cities are more efficient users of energy. Not suburban areas. Cities, real cities. Bangalore, New York, Chengdu. They are more efficient users of energy.

They are cosmopolitan and filled with innovation. They allow transportation that is not, let’s say, driving around in a car. Urbanization is the best sustainability news we’ve got. By putting 10,000,000,000 people in the countryside, would be very worrisome. But if you had 8,000,000,000 of them in a city, and you had production going on and some kind of balance and some protected areas and some coffee plantations, the future doesn’t have to be awful. It doesn’t have to be Soylent Green, right.

(chuckles)

You know, urbanization can be good. Bangalore is a really interesting case. That’s been a very effectively urbanized, well, it’s not a very well run city.

I’m going to be on TV, right? Bangalore is a very well run city.

(audience laughter)

I have to be invited back. It’s not a very well run city. It’s not especially sustainable, but it certainly could be. So urbanization is our biggest opportunity. I think liveable cities is probably the most important part of sustainability. Having said that, these species are not going to live in cities. Those frogs, those birds, they need something like nature.

And if the nature happens to be coffee that is consumed by urban people who pump the money back into the rural economy in something that looks like a tradeoff, you can sustain rural biodiversity and urban biodiversity. Foxes and– There’s foxes runnin’ through my yard, crazy. So my answer is: urbanization has been a boogieman for the environmental movement since 1965, and it’s a mistake. Cities are part of the sustainability ticket to the future. Both because of their efficiency and because of their relationship to the countryside, right. Because they flow resources back to working people that allow them to maintain landscapes that are not totally destroyed, right. You need a diverse economy. Does that–

–

[Audience]

Yes, thank you.

–

[Paul]

Yeah, it’s a great, it’s an important question. I’m not an urbanist, so that’s why you’re not seeing enough cities. We’ll bring one in. I have colleagues.

Way smarter than me. Anything else?

–

[Shakhashiri]

Yeah, I have another question. We have time.

–

[Paul]

That’s why I try to talk fast.

–

[Shakhashiri]

We have lots of time. I’m beginning to see your point about the effect locally in the southern part of India.

I’m beginning to see that point.

–

[Paul]

Indonesia, Bangladesh is falling now.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Yeah?

–

[Paul]

Oh, yeah.

–

[Shakhashiri]

What I’m trying to think about is…

What do those of us who are enjoying this expensive coffee.-

[Paul]

Citizenship.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Yeah.

–

[Paul]

That’s your question.

–

[Shakhashiri]

What do, other than continuing to buy this expensive coffee, hopefully some of the money will go back there, what, is that it?

– Well, I think there’s several things, right? So I think that’s true. So one of the things that might work in this case, right, has to do with getting rents on the coffee, so to speak, land rents that can pay for the environmental externalities. Which means getting more money for your coffee, basically. And then agreeing to grow it in a way that produces frogs, right?

That’s like shade-grown coffee, fair trade coffee, all those markets that wealthy Americans pay for even though they are not quite sure what they’re getting for their money. I mean, come on. Do you really know what you’re getting when you’re getting fair trade coffee? No, you don’t. But that’s one part of it, is responsible consumption. I don’t favor that. I think what we’re really talking about here is about making and establishing policy. Powerful people, wealthy people, should establish policy that produce the effects that are desired, which means rural healthcare, you know. People in Uttar Pradesh are not making the kinds of demands on rural healthcare that they could, right? Rural healthcare drives down the fertility rate.

Rural healthcare keeps people on the land in a way that is more sustainable. It lowers costs, household costs that can be put back into a farm operation that’s sustainable. There are policy measures that are pretty common sensical. Better healthcare, better education. In other words, if you’re an environmentalist, let’s put it this way, you should spend less time trying to save tigers in those tiny parks, there, I’ve said it, and more time building health clinics. That’s what I would say. It’s about a certain low number of dollars that we have as people who were concerned about the sustainable future of the Earth and where we put those few chips, and I think they should be put on the rural poor. I think that’s where your best bet is, you know? And the problem is, and now I’ll be bold, historically, and people who do describe themselves as environmentalists, are terrified of the rural poor.

They’re gonna want TVs like me.

They’re gonna want air conditioning. They’re gonna want all these things, and they’re going to destroy the Earth. It’s white people scared of the brown masses. And I am saying that you invest in those people. You give them electricity, you work with them to provide the kind of energy that’s not coal, and you will get a sustainable future. Because these folks are not going away, and they have the right to make those demands. And that’s not anathema to a sustainable future to work with the rural poor. And Malthus, if it was ever true, it’s coming to an end. I’m an anti-Malthusian on this, we differ a little bit. But I will say that even if you’re a Malthusian, look at these numbers.

The world is changing even now. It’s good news.

–

[Shakhashiri]

I like good news; I’m not a gloom and doom person.

(Paul and audience laugh)

But I want to learn what responsible action should be taken, not only individually, but collectively.

– We should be thinking about development. And we should be thinking about urbanization. The question that came from up here on urbanization was really crucial.

–

[Audience]

Okay. It looks like on your map there about half of India, half of it, the area is…

Through world population increase, what fraction of the population of India is in–

–

[Paul]

Is within that?

–

[Audience]

Yes.

– Right. So the highest density populations and the most people fall in the Gangetic Plain where some of the highest growth is. So there’s no question that this is growth on a higher number than this is lack of growth on a lower number. So, in other words, this is a declining number over time, but it’s a smaller number. It’s a direct answer to your question. It’s a smaller number than what we see up here. But this is gonna tip too. Like, this is coming. These states weren’t negative growth states 20 years ago.

Kerala maybe, none of the rest. It’s all new. So it’s just a question of how quickly these things transition, which is why we can’t pick whether it’s 9,000,000,000 or 10,000,000,000, right. That’s why it’s hard to come up with that number. Because we don’t know how fast states in the north are gonna behave like states in the south. And that’s true in Indonesia. It’s true in Malaysia. Hell, in Singapore, the government has a whole campaign co-sponsored by a candy company to get people on their Independence National Night to go get with it. You see what I’m saying? They have advertisements on television.

They are worried that their population is getting too small.

Isn’t that crazy?

The world’s crazy. Stuff is happening around us that 1973 just is not ready for.

–

[Audience]

I have another question.

–

[Paul]

Please.-

[Audience]

Could you tell us about some more details about farmers who came to the realization that biodiversity was very good for their crops, and how that information is shared from one part of an agriculture area of the world to another part…?

– Great question. So I’m gonna answer the second question first. I’ll give you a grounded example. There’s something called the honeybee network, and the honeybee network is south-south technology transfer. So they don’t bother talking to Americans or Europeans. They just talk to each other. So, East Africans are touring farms in Gujarat, and Gujaratis are visiting coffee farms in Central America. So there are networks globally, and information technology has, I think, aided this enormously, which is about sharing best practices, coming up with clever solutions, learning about how to create cooperatives, for example, and other kinds of institutional solutions.

So, there’s a lot of south-south knowledge transfer. But to answer the first question, none of these people think that biodiversity is good for them, except maybe because of tourism. For the most part, what they are doing is simply responding to labor and crop markets. And when labor and the crop markets are right based on their land size, they accidentally make biodiversity friendly decisions. So, if we’re interested, this is another lesson about sustainability. Waiting for everybody to agree with you to save the Earth is a huge waste of time.

(audience laughter)

It makes much more sense to say if this person is making decisions that produce a diversity of trees which produce the biodiversity we want, then we should either subsidize them to do it or figure out how to kind of mess with the economy in a way that kind of encourages that. It takes some tinkering. You get your hands on the levers.

One of the tests we’re running now is, are farmers who are in cooperatives more likely to have tree diversity for whatever economic reasons, and therefore bird diversity? And if that’s true, then what you would want to do as an environmental citizen is encourage, subsidize or work with cooperatives. But we don’t know, that’s still an empirical question. That test is still being run. So there’s two answers. One is south-south learning is vibrant right now. And I would say, coming back to the urban question on sustainability, the greatest network of learners right now are mayors. Which has nothing to do with my coffee case. Mayors are talking to each other. The mayor of Seattle is talking to mayors in China about what the heck, ’cause it’s a practical problem.

How do you deal with sea level rise? How do you maintain a shipping grid? You know, with an electricity, a limit to your electricity. So there’s a lot of learning going on, it’s just not at the sort of national, federal, you know, the failure of climate negotiations at the national scale has been matched by the success of climate activities by mayors, county government. I mean, the decentralization of this decision-making is quite remarkable and quite effective.

–

[Audience]

Are you the only person in the room that knows this?

(audience laughter)

We never heard this.

–

[Paul]

I will connect you to the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in which a majority of Americans live in cities signed, where mayors signed the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Now, some of these people, it’s just green washing. It’s like, oh, yeah, I’m green. And you know, the city just goes on doing stupid stuff. But a lot of these cities are making really good decisions because if they don’t, they’re screwed. You know, when somebody like Mayor Bloomberg comes out and says, “I think sea level rise is going to be a problem and we might want to think about restoring wetlands,”

(makes wacky vocalization)

that’s quite a revelation, right?

Coming out of that storm sequence. My point here is that people, this is happening. It’s not happening enough, it needs to happen more. Environmental citizenship is about directing those kinds of changes. But I think it comes out of, now I’m just gonna be on TV, get myself into more trouble. I think it has to do with a history of environmentalism in the environmental community. I describe myself as an environmentalist. It’s not what I do for a living. I am a scientist. But I worry about the Earth, and I think that my brothers and sisters in this movement have depended upon waiting for the national government to do something that’s gonna be a centralized solution all the time.

And I think that is necessary, but insufficient to the project.

Oh, now I’m getting myself into trouble. I like mayors, my bet’s on mayors. There should be a global parliament of mayors. And they should just get together and say, “Here are a bunch of things I’m doing in a city that work. What are you doing?” And they could all agree to do it, it’d be revolutionary.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Let me see if I can get you in some more trouble.

(audience laughter)

And I’m cautious in asking this question.

–

[Paul]

I’ll be cautious in answering.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Be bold. It’s up to you. So, are there other crops around the world that can now, what’s the right word, benefit from this approach?

And what about crops around the world that are economically lucrative, but not good for our health?

– Not good for our health. So, there’s a big question, and it’s bigger than my knowledge. So I have to admit you’ve hit the edge of my ignorance.

Which is vast.

(audience laughter)

But I would say that central Wisconsin potatoes are a very interesting crop. So, what makes them interesting? Well, we could talk about how awful they are. For a moment, let’s talk about how awful they are.

Knowing potato growers around the state who are really, really thoughtful, smart people and I like them a lot and they are feeding the world and all the rest of that. High capacity bore wells, right? You know, drawing on the water resources very, very heavily. Big problem with potatoes. It is a high input crop, you know, in terms of nutrients, pesticides. You know, it’s a dirty crop. It can be a dirty crop. But one of the things that they’ve gotten better at in central Wisconsin is doing the kinds of things that I was just talking about. Using those corners where central pivot doesn’t touch to produce all kinds of biodiversity. They’re doing all these things.

The problem is they can’t get a premium for it. Why is that? Even though they’re producing biodiversity. Let’s say these farmers who are producing potatoes, just like our coffee growers, and they’re producing biodiversity at the field edges along with some forest remnants, restoring some of their prairie, why can’t they get a revenue for that? And the answer is because it’s not organic. So once again environmentalism defeats itself, right? I understand what organic is, right. Organic is no inputs for seven years. These potato growers are not gonna hit that mark, but they might be producing more biodiversity than an organic farm. How can we pay them for those ecosystem services?

How can we get them to do it? And so they tried working with the University of Wisconsin for a brand in this area. I believe it’s Nature Grown. Something like that. Anybody familiar with this? The problem is that people don’t understand it. It’s not organic, it’s too complicated. It’s got biodiversity, but it’s kind of industrial. It’s very hard to market stuff like this, right? Innovation that isn’t nice and clean, you know, that makes easy sense to people, is very hard to sell.

So my point is everything I said about coffee is true about every crop. You could have more biodiverse all kinds of stuff. You could always have more. Are there crops we should do away with? Are there bad incentives? Yeah. Right? The ethanol incentive.

The ethanol incentive, he says to the camera, has actually resulted, in the last few years, in the elimination of a lot of prairie and wetlands that were put in through the conservation, through federal conservation investments throughout the 1990s and 2000s. All that stuff that was moving forward fell backwards, because we’re working across purposes.

On the one hand, the federal government’s paying people to take corn out and bring, you know, wild nature back in places that aren’t very productive. On the other hand, they’re subsidizing corn, which takes land into production that was out in wetlands and had the tile stopped up and all of that. So, you got the government working across purposes. So my point about that is all crops could be more sustainable. They have to be. There will be 10,000,000,000 people. We will have to eat. We will have to have energy. It’s gonna have to happen. But I’m sure there’s a better way to do it.

And that’s what sustainability science is. It’s is a rigorous look at where you can squeeze those margins, make those trade-offs in ways that are sensible. But it’s not gonna happen without government action, even federal government action. It’s not gonna happen without local action. It’s not gonna happen without people demanding that those things happen. But what you can’t demand is that we’re all gonna go back into a cave. You know, it’s just not gonna happen. And you’re welcome to, but I think it’s somewhat offensive to ask somebody in India to do that. So that’s the one thing that’s off the table. You can’t ask for that.

What’s left then is the fountain of human ingenuity and creativity and new social networks and good regulation and stuff like that.

Now just get over the whole, like, hobbit thing. Right? That’s all.

I know, hobbits are awesome.

Go ahead.-

[Audience]

You said earlier that the population was probably going to top off at 10,000,000, but is the USA being, like, iconically sustainable? In, like, the population growth? Is it contributing much to the total?

– So much to say about that, all of it a little contradictory. So let me give you the glass half full and the glass half empty. The bad news is this. Population growth in the United States is higher, fertility rates are higher in this county than they are in southern India. And we use a whole lot more stuff than people in southern India. We have an energy intensive lifestyle, right, that is driving climate change and doing all that stuff that we all agree is bad. So, before I told anybody in India to do this or that, I would probably start with a lot of questions about consumption and lifestyle and whatever else. So that’s the glass half-empty. And the answer is yes. The United States is contributing to global climate change through the destruction of ecosystems.

Yeah, sure, all wealthy countries do so far, right? Now the glass half full. Energy and material intensity of the US economy is declining at an incredible rate. In other words, many of us in this room are old enough to remember my 1972 Dodge Dart Swinger Special. It’s a car.

(audience laughter)

It weighed a ton, right. And on average a car produces about as much carbon dioxide or about as much greenhouse gases as its weight annually. Just for the record. That’s just a back of the envelope kind of calculation.

Those cars are getting a lot lighter. I mean, the amount of stuff that it takes to be an American is less now than ever before. Water use per capita is down. One of the big jumps it made in the 1990s, it went like

(imitates whooshing)

, like that. Where did that come from? Smaller toilet tanks.

I mean, it’s not rocket surgery. So we’ve made a lot of progress in dematerializing the American lifestyle and the American economy through innovation, through technology.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem. We do. But it’s an interesting trend, and we’ve got to bank on it. It takes something like four times less energy to live to be 72, globally, than it used to. It’s kind of an odd statistic, but I got it from a recent paper and I think it’s an interesting one. That people are living longer and they’re using less energy over the course of their lifetimes to get there. That’s not a bad thing. I would like to make 72. I’m probably not gonna make it much longer. My grandfather was 101.

Yeah, but on the other side of the family, bad genes. Anyway, I’m off-topic. My point is people are living longer and they’re using less stuff to get there, right. We can dematerialize the economy. That is a good news trend in intensive countries like northern Europe and the United States. That’s where that dematerialization is the strongest signal. It’s happening more there than elsewhere. And if you’d like to write me, I can actually provide some very good papers and statistics on dematerialization, which is fascinating. I mean, if you’re really optimistic, like suddenly we just won’t need anything, we’ll just live on, like, we’ll be like, live on air or somethin’, I don’t know. Where’s it all going?

I’m flabbergasted. Technology keeps me humble.-

[Audience]

I was wondering, in southwest India, how it’s doing with providing electricity or solar power, water. I keep reading about, hearing about various projects to bring into parts of India different kinds of power.

– Yeah, it’s actually, each of those is a different problem. I’m going to go all the way back to my water map. But at the very beginning, what you noticed about the natural distribution of rainfall in India, in this part of India even, is it’s really dramatically uneven, right? So what we’re lookin’ at here, I’m almost there, sorry. This is a good map for that.

Here we go. Is that you’ve got, in these areas here, this is just natural condition. Now, these will change with climate change and changes in the monsoon over the next century. God only knows what’s gonna happen. But for the moment, historically, over 250 centimeters along the coast, what happens is the monsoon seasonally comes up here, blasts down here, spends itself on the west side of the hills, and by the time it gets over here and goes north it’s kind of dumped a lot of its moisture. So this is a water deficit place, right? And this is a water surplus place. That’s the state of Kerala down here. This is the state of Karnataka here. But the most wealthy people, all those software engineers who are living very, I see them.

They’re on BMW motorcycles in leather coats and giant cameras on their back, and they’re going into the countryside to photograph birds. Those people all live here in in what is essentially a high elevation desert. So, in the end, they’re gonna have to redistribute water. They’re going to. Right, there’s only so much conservation they can do. Somebody’s gonna build a big dam right here, because what’s happening? The water is basically coming here and running into the ocean. And from the point of view of the Indian government, that’s a waste of resources. Now, we can argue about what happens when you build big dams. They’re always environmentally problematic.

So trade-offs, trade-offs, trade-offs. But water’s gonna be redistributed. Energy? Yeah. Energy is coming online like nothing I’ve ever seen. Electricity everywhere in the south, and it is coming very heavily, unfortunately, from coal fired power plants, which means contributions to global climate change. You know? So what would you prefer? Solar energy, okay, there’s some. Particular in distributed rural areas.

But to keep the lights on in Bangalore…

how do you feel about nuclear power?

Seriously, how do you feel about it?

I’m asking. The person who asked the question, how do you feel about it?

–

[Audience]

Well, I see some of the positives

(static)

compared to coal.

–

[Paul]

Compared to coal. Compared to coal, you know, burning people alive is probably a better idea, you know? Coal is like the filthiest thing.

(audience laughter)

Oh, my god.

(audience laughter)

So, my point here is that infrastructure is on the rise throughout India Dams are going in. Roads, the roads are unbelievably good compared to what I remember from 1988, you know?

When you had to make a trunk phone call home. I mean, it’s not the India of anybody’s memory. The last five years has fundamentally changed the infrastructure system, which means a redistribution in energy, it means a redistribution in water. It’s massive and some of it is very problematic, but some of it is really filled with possibilities. You get those people back in those, get ’em in the city, right? Where it costs a whole lot less water and a whole let less energy when you’re in a big well built apartment block than if you’re distributed across a large suburban kind of sprawl, right? So, going back to the earlier question from the gentleman on the back right, this is happening in India, and it’s sure happening in China. You know, there are cities even exist 20 years ago in any meaningful way, which are larger than any city in the United States. Everything interesting is happening somewhere else. For the most part.

I’m a geographer, so I get to say that. I’m really sorry what I said about bodies. That’s kind of a Soylent Greeny kind of thing to say. So regretting it. Okay, so that’s the answer to that question, is that a lot of infrastructure is going in.-

[Audience]

So I live on the east side of Madison. We have an old garage. We have an apple tree that’s gotten climbed on and it’s going to die. We have our curly willow that I feel like I need to cut down, because it’s getting very tall.

We have easements that we mow every couple of weeks. Should we just let some of these things go? We’ve got squirrels and–

–

[Paul]

That’s a great–

–

[Audience]

…and rabbits.

–

[Paul]

You could have so much more, right? So there’s lots of ways to cultivate biodiversity in suburban landscapes. So, when I’m not researching India, by the way, I wrote another book called Lawn People, which is about why people use chemicals and keep lawns. People who use lawn chemicals, in our nationwide study in the United States, are more likely to say that lawn chemicals are bad for the environment, their children, and water quality than people who don’t use chemicals.

– Which means they read the bag, you know? And they’re like, “I feel so bad.” I don’t have a lot of practical suggestions there, but what I did in that research was meet a lot of people who have online, you know, online not-for-profits that will tell you all the different ways you could bring pollinators back to your landscape, restore just little swaths of native prairie. There’s all kinds of groovy stuff you could do.

I mean, one of the great things about being an American is that you’ve got all this land that you get to play with, I mean, compared to, say, people living in Bangalore, right, who might have a garden plot. You actually have an opportunity to experiment. And there’s lots of resources. More resources than I could ever tell you. And it’s basically restoration ecology that you can perform. And this university, this great university, is the one that invented restoration ecology. There are people on this campus in Extension who will come out to your property and say, yeah, you could bring in, you know, indigenous grass varieties. It would increase your birds and pollinators and butterflies. This is easy for them, this is what they’re paid for. They’re paid out of your taxes to tell you how to restore biodiversity.

Call them. So that’s the answer. And I think that that’s the other part of this citizenship thing. Yes, if it works for somebody who has to make a living out of coffee or his kids don’t eat, then it’ll work for you on a landscape that’s essentially recreational for you purposes, right. I assume you’re not making your living off of that property. That gives you an enormous gift. It’s the gift of discretion, freedom to kind of experiment. So experimenting on your landscape is great. We just have a big forest. I insisted that I just couldn’t have a lawn.

They freak me out. Because I always feel bad I’m not mowing it, right. I always feel bad I’m not putting pesticides on it. It’s the whole national culture. We’re totally, we feel bad that we’re not doing bad things. That’s crazy. It’s nuts. Great opportunity. And the east side, do you know that there is a municipal? This is a pioneering municipality.

There’s a law here, I don’t know if it’s still on the books, but it was written about in a law journal in the 1990s, that is basically a freedom to farm act for your lawn. It makes it harder for your neighbors to sue you if you do something that isn’t lawn, right, because this is the biggest problem. In Florida, if you remove your lawn, you’re likely to be sued by your neighbors. You may actually be in a homeowners association where it’s actually against, you know, it’s actually against the rules. You can be fined, right? People are fined. Every spring, read the Florida newspapers. There’s like 15 lawsuits against some clown who didn’t, you know, cut their lawn on time.

You’re living on the east side of Madison? It’s like paradise for this stuff.

If you aren’t, like, growing weird stuff, you’re missing a huge opportunity. There are people in Florida who would love to trade places with you. Is that helpful? Go do it. We got foxes runnin’ through the property. I’ve never seen anything like it. And they are bold. They look into the window, and they’re just like…

(audience laughter)

I love ’em.

The dogs are flummoxed. These are two Great Danes and they’re like…

You know, nature.

(audience laughter)

All right, was there another question?

(chuckles)

–

[Audience]

I wanted to go back to the frogs. So, one, how will this infrastructure affect the frogs?

And, secondly, you talked about the, you didn’t understand why the stream pour in the north wouldn’t move down to the south.

–

[Paul]

We haven’t seen it yet.

–

[Audience]

What if there was a movement to bring them there? How would that affect the frogs, and how long would it take them to get back to their sustainability–

–

[Paul]

Right, great questions. So let me take the second one first, and then we’ll go back. See, the thing is, cheap labor is what makes the biodiversity possible. I don’t think I’ve been entirely clear here. The fact that people can get their hands on cheap labor, which has always been true until recently, means that they can have a highly extensive biodiverse system. It counted on, poverty was the secret engine of biodiversity in the region. That was the point that I don’t think I made strongly enough. It’s the availability of cheap labor that means you don’t have to intensify production, open up the canopy, change your cropping into something more industrial, because labor, whenever you replace labor in agriculture, there’s only one thing you can replace it with: technology, right. That’s what the history of farming in the United States is. That’s why less than 1% of the population actually farms.

It’s because all of that labor has been displaced by giant machines. It’s much harder to mechanize coffee, I should point out. But my point about this is I’m not convinced that bringing in migrant labor from Bahar would be bad for biodiversity. It might be bad for those workers. It might be an opportunity for them, though, too. So that’s just a question I don’t have anywhere near the resources or knowledge to answer.

–

[Audience]

So is there any push to do that, Paul?

– Not on the part of the state governments.

Nobody’s saying, yeah, we should go up to Bihar and get trucks of workers, but what you do see in the Indian economy is trucks of workers. There’s a whole other, this is not my area, labor economics. There’s a whole economy of people who go and broker workers with landowners. So they go to the landowner and say, “How many workers are you gonna need? “How long are you gonna need ’em?” He contracts that. Then he’ll go back up to some other place, and he’ll find, round up those workers essentially, sign a contract with them, put them in the truck, and drive them to the owner. And usually the situation is very, very bad for the worker. Like, the people making money there are the farm owner and the broker. Having said that, it happens all the time.

So that’s just a side note, is that there is a labor economy. We just haven’t seen it.

–

[Audience]

Well, that almost sounds like slave trade.

– Well, I’ll tell you what slave trade is. Slave trade is the people who lived on these farms for the last hundred years without electricity in huts on the private owner’s farm accepting whatever terms for pay, subsistence pay, they were receiving. That was first British colonial people and now wealthy Indians, essentially. That is slavery. And now, this is what’s so great about it, the owners are complaining, right.

This is the punchline. Workers are lazy. Workers are smoking cigarettes. It’s because they won’t be treated like slaves anymore. There’s an economic revolution going on. It’s enormously exciting. The worry is, right, that farmers with the loss of that labor, it’s good for workers, right? The loss of that labor might make decisions to intensify production which might be bad for frogs.

So, what’s good for workers isn’t always good for frogs. How do we?

That’s sustainability science. That’s the problem, right? We’d like to think that if we just did the right thing, everything else would follow. And it doesn’t work like that. The system’s too complex. Does that help?

–

[Audience]

Well, so the frogs are, I mean, the sustainability of the frogs is very hard to

(mumbles)

. Right?

–

[Paul]

Right.

–

[Audience]

So it’s not like, it seems like if you’re trying to solve one solution, you’re not, it almost seemed very ideal when you first presented it, that we did this and it was good for everybody, including the frogs.

– It was good for the frogs. The question is, how do you sustain it?

So, do you subsidize it? Do you build cooperatives? Are farmers who have cooperatives, is it easier, in other words, on their pocketbook to retain avian diversity, because they’re retaining tree diversity? These are our questions we don’t have answers to yet, but what we wanna do is find those levers, because the farmers aren’t doing it for frogs. It’s not idyllic. It’s a happy accident. Like most things in the world, you know? So how can you reproduce a happy accident? And I think that that’s the role of experimentation, adaptive management. You try something, you see if it works.

It’s trial and error. It’s essentially a crude form of the scientific method, in a sense. So I think that there’s lots of things we can do in India to preserve biodiversity. I wouldn’t call it precarious. I mean, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, but look at how much diversity we’re finding where nobody even tried to keep it. What if we were trying? Imagine what we could achieve.

Half full, glass half full. What was the first question though?

–

[Audience]

About the infrastructure and the frogs.

– Well, I don’t know, you know? I think the frogs depend a lot on standing water. The birds depend on tree diversity, so they really are responding to two different things. And I assume that pesticides, although I still have to run these tests, are bad for frogs. But I don’t know that. We’ve got to run some regressions and, you know, figure that out. I don’t think large scale, this is a different problem. If you move a huge amount of water from the western part of India to the central part of India, and you build a big dam, all kinds of things are gonna die.

That’s what’s gonna happen. Having said that, you know, not moving that water means a bunch of people might move somewhere else and a bunch of things would die. So I think, at this point, you have a series of trade-offs. That’s what sustainability’s about. Like, there’s not some magic thing we can do. We’re stuck here together. Us, the frogs, you know? We’re gonna have to just, like, muddle through. I’m confident we have the apparatus to do that. And the frogs are depending on it, because the frogs aren’t gonna move.

These are endemic species. You can’t just pick them up and put them somewhere. If you want that diversity, you’re gonna have to put your hand on the land and be a steward.

I don’t think we are as gods, but we are the biggest, noisiest animal, you know? And you’re gonna have to do something. You’re gonna have to make decisions.

I’m having a lot of fun. You have a good group.

Yeah.

–

[Audience]

You touched on it a bit when you talked about Singapore. Would you comment on the way forward for countries where declining birth rate is dramatic and serious. Like Japan and South Korea and industrialized most of Europe and so forth.

What is the way forward for those countries? Is it immigration?- Well, that’s outside of my pay grade. But I would, So I’m not gonna punt, I’m gonna answer, but it’s, I don’t have an answer to that. I mean, my opinion’s probably as useful as yours is, right? Because it’s not informed very well.

I haven’t done– That’s not true. I am publishing a paper right now on international population decline. So, yes, I am an expert.

(audience laughter)

What I will say is this–

–

[Audience]

And there’s environmental impact reports, too, to the success in the industrialization in other–

–

[Paul]

Yes, you bet.

–

[Audience]

In those countries.

– But depopulation, in many cases, is about land abandonment and forests coming back. The Kuznets curve as it’s referred to, right? I don’t fully believe in it, but we have seen, in countries that have developed rapidly, we see land abandonment for people moving to the city, and what happens on the land they’ve abandoned? This has happened in the Andes. This has happened throughout Latin America.

(imitates explosion)

Crazy nature comes back. It wasn’t the nature we had before, because you can never really go back. But it’s still like, you know, forests and whatnot. So, depopulation has all kinds of interesting implications for biodiversity that aren’t always negative. They can be positive. What’s appropriate policy?

(scoffs)

You know, you’re going to need labor. You got an aging population. I mean, the biggest problem, the global problem, is really about ethnicity, race, and tolerance.

You’re gonna need people who are, who’s taking care of all those aging people? Foreign nationals in almost all these countries. Not in China, yet. Somebody has to, you know. In populations that are shrinking, they’re also aging, like the state of Wisconsin is aging. Who is gonna look after people as they get older? It’s a fascinating question. For the most part, it means foreign nationals. It means immigration until we’ve got, worked up the robot solution. You think I’m kidding.

I’m totally, like, the robots are everywhere. I thought it was such a 1960s thing, the robot, but now I see it. I was just over at dairy, it was all robotic. Maybe the robots are gonna take care of me when I’m old. I have no idea, okay? But what I am saying is that right now the policies are bad because they tend to be chauvinistic. They tend to be anti-immigrant. They tend to be looking a gift horse in the mouth, which is aspiring populations of people who are ready to labor in an economy where the laboring population is declining and the dependent population is aging out. So, generally speaking, you’re gonna have to learn to live with strangers in your midst. And that’s, I actually think this is, the United States has actually performed better than many of the countries you just mentioned.

Singapore is terrible in this regard. That’s why they want more Singaporeans. They’re trying to keep the population of all the immigrants down while they’re trying to encourage their own population to reproduce, and it’s hopeless. People don’t wanna have more kids. Wealthy people. So, that gets into a social system, you know, about which I am strictly an amateur. But this is about immigration, race, tolerance, diversity. Cosmopolitanism.

Payment for effective labor. By effective labor I mean who looks after old people, who takes care of kids, right?

You know, that labor force. This is the most important labor force of the 21st century precisely because of the demographic shift. But now we’re kind of off the sustainability question a little bit, but I think it’s the question. There are a lot of smart people working on it. I’m just not one of them. What do you think?

–

[Audience]

I agree with some of the things that you said. That other people need to be

(mumbles)

.

–

[Paul]

There’s no way around it.-

[Audience]

And this will turn…

The sustainability, it has to be an issue then, in those countries.

– Yes, and there’s all kinds of opportunities here. When you’re working in the United States and you’re sending remittances home, all kinds of things can happen on that landscape that are possible in a way that mining the hell out of it for resources when you’re really hungry and you don’t have all that money coming in from the US, it’s a worse option.

And it’s an open question. There’s some empirical research that needs to be done here, but I would guess remittances are probably good for the environment in the receiving country, if I just had to make up a hypothesis to test. And that can be a good thing. So that’s kind of the sustainability relationship. Triple bottom line, right? Poor people’s aspirations, biodiversity, environmental protection, yeah. So much so, in fact, that the environmental groups in the United States, which historically have been somewhat anti-immigrant, have changed their mind on this question. So a number of very, very important, notable, Sierra Club-like organizations have gone from flirting with an anti-immigrant policy to staying out of that fight entirely. The seat change on this has been quite dramatic in the environmental community, and I salute it.

Okay.

–

[Shakhashiri]

On your first point, Paul, about integration.-

[Paul]

Oh, integration of the sciences. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Well, was it just the integration of sciences or integration of different forces in society to deal with the changes that are happening

either caused by humans or otherwise?

Integration is hard, right?

–

[Paul]

Yeah, yeah.

–

[Shakhashiri]

By your first definition of that.

–

[Paul]

Yeah, it’s a good question, Bassam.-

[Shakhashiri]

So you’re referring to the integration of knowledge.

–

[Paul]

Knowledge. As a science. But, of course, it’s because of the problem is an integrated one. I mean, if there’s anything about the frogs and the birds which is universal and not just about agroforest, it’s the fact that if you keep chasing the causal chain of why here you don’t have diversity, here you do. Why? Oh, because farmer Jane is doing X.

Well, why? You’re gonna wind up in a causal network, which is gonna be well beyond what predator prey relationships are gonna explain. We’re going to get past zoology and wildlife biology pretty quickly. And, in that sense, the problem is integrated, so the solutions have to be integrated. What I didn’t mention and I want to take the chance to do so is that this guy here, my colleague, that guy is basically a political scientist who’s an expert on agrarian laws and political economy and incentives and institutions and stuff like that. And my other co-author here, Krithi, is conservation biologist. And I’m whatever I am. And we’ve learned an awful lot from each other chasing this problem, right. And there’s no way any of us could have done this alone. There’s just no way we could have gotten the answers to these questions.

And we’ve kind of changed our minds about things. Krithi comes from a very, quite frankly, very famous conservation biology family, and her old man, Ullas Karanth, quite well known. He’s terrific, great scientist. Single-handedly saved most of the tigers in southern India. He just hates people. I mean, until recently his position has been whatever about coffee plantations. We need to build more wildlife parks, right. And I see his point, right. But in working on this project in and around him, he’s become much softer on this question. He’s like, all right, we need parks and some coffee.

And this is a big change. So integration is also about the property of emergence. That things come out of the relationship that didn’t exist before, you know? And so, I’ve changed my thinking about a lot of stuff by just being in this community of scholars, ’cause the problem is too complicated for my very narrow training. Yeah, so that’s the cool thing about sustainability, right? Now I like sustainability.

–

[Shakhashiri]

We hope our own thinking will also change and help all of us.

–

[Paul]

Thanks for having me.

–

[Shakhashiri]

Thank you very much, Paul.

(audience applause)