Episode 5 - Nov 15, 2020
Photographer Garth Lenz and systems scientist Dr. Elizabeth Sawin help us take the details of the past four episodes, process them together, and see the big picture—both through Lenz's aerial photography and Sawin's "multisolving" approach to systemic change.
Learn more about Rising Tide and stream the movie at novaslc.org/crossroads.
Learn more about Climate Interactive at climateinteractive.org, and Dr. Sawin’s TED Talk at youtube.com/watch?v=prF8trTallQ
View Garth Lenz’s photographer at garthlenz.com. His TED Talk on the tar sands can be viewed at ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_the_true_cost_of_oil
Hosts:
Anne Francis Bayless, Fry Street Quartet cellist
Dr. Rob Davies, Utah State University Dept of Physics (Twitter @robsMast)
Guests:
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, Systems Scientist and Co-Founder/Co-Director of Climate Interactive (Twitter @bethsawin)
Garth Lenz, Photojournalist and Fine Art Photographer (Instagram @Garth.Lenz)
produced by Chris Myers (argylearts.com)
Copyright © 2020 NOVA Chamber Music Series. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the NOVA Podcast.
Anne Francis Bayless:
HI everybody. Welcome to the NOVA Podcast. I'm Anne Francis Bayless, the cellist of the Fry Street Quartet. We serve as co-music directors for the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City and we are also the quartet in residence at The King College of the Arts at Utah State University. Recently the Fry Street Quartet and physicist, Dr. Robert Davies premiered the film version of Rising Tide, The Crossroads Project, which is a multi-disciplinary performance project addressing issues of global sustainability. This is Episode 5 of the NOVA Podcast's Crossroads Series, and the subject today is people. To talk more about this project, I'd like to introduce my co-host and colleague Dr. Rob Davies.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Thank you Anne, and hello everybody and thank you for joining us once again. As Anne said, this is the fifth in our series. I'm Rob Davies, co-creator of The Crossroads Project, along with my friends, the Fry Street Quartet, as you just heard. And I want to once again thank the NOVA Chamber Music Series and Utah State University, the Caine College of the Arts, for supporting this work. And there will be a whole bunch of other folks we'll thank well who will tag at the end of the show. So just a means of recapping, this performance that we have filmed, and that NOVA has premiered, Rising Tide, looks at the rules of nature and the rule of people and mismatch that is driving an enormous change in our planet and creating an enormous risk for us, for people. And so far in these podcasts we've been looking at the rules of nature.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Today, we're looking at the rules of modern civilization, the paradigms these systems that we depend on, food and energy and economy, have been found upon and how we might change that. And if you haven't yet seen the film, you can view it for free, we will link to it in the comments below. But just to start off today's conversation, I want to start with just a few film clips to give us a taste of what this section of people, which we call Societas, is about. So this first clip, we'll go ahead and run, talks about the notion that everything is connected.
Arising from this earth system is another system. We'll call it System Us. Living tissue made sentience, sentience made civilized. Through ages of stone, iron, and copper, emerged human systems within ecosystems, human bubbles in the biosphere. And then, in the age of carbon, bubbles begin to merge. Everything connecting to everything. Food to energy, energy to economy, economy to governance, one nation to another, each nation to all the others, all together global, altogether complex. A hedge fund flaps its financial wings in Hong Kong and an economic hurricane swirls in London.
So we start with the notion that, in human civilization now, everything is connected, all of these systems. And then we move to a feature of our human modern global civilization that is giving us real problems, and that is the notion of exponential growth.
Fold a piece of paper in half. You double its thickness. Fold it again, it doubles again. And after nine folds, you will have a piece of paper about one inch thick. But, with just four more folds you could have a piece of paper one foot thick. And with just 12 folds more, if you can manage, you will have a piece of paper one mile thick. What? You don't believe me. It's right there in the math, exponential growth in action. Everything is small until it's huge, and everything is fine until it's not. Well, in nature of course, such growth never lasts because it cannot. The physics of a material world supersedes the mathematics of infinite growth. In nature a system grows to maturity and levels, or a system grows through overshoot of its resource to collapse.
And finally, in this section, we look at the damage that our systems of food, energy, economy and this hyper consumptive growth are causing. Something we call sacrifice zones.
Because arising from hyper consumption is hyper destruction. Sacrifice zones of land and life. Real people, real places, everywhere on our island planet. And like everything in the anthroposphere, these sacrifice zones are growing. Cheap food, cheap energy, cheap stuff, it turns out, isn't so cheap.
So as you can see, we try to cover quite a bit of ground in a pretty short amount of time. And the idea of this podcast, of course, has been to invite additional voices to talk about this and further the exploration and further the discussion, expand it a bit. And so we've got as we have with these podcasts two additional voices with us today, both scientific and artistic, and Anne, perhaps you will introduce our first guest.
Anne Francis Bayless:
Yes, I'd be happy to. It's really my pleasure to introduce photographer Garth Lenz, who has been one of our collaborators on Rising Tide since its premiere in 2012. His fine art and editorial work has been exhibited all over the world, received international awards, appeared in countless publications from the New York Times to National Geographic. And the contrast between the industrial and natural landscapes is really a central theme in his work and he often photographs from the air as a means to communicate the unprecedented scale of industrialism's environmental impact, you can see that in a lot of the photographs that are featured in the film. His TED Talk, The True Cost of Oil, is an absolute must watch for any of you who haven't seen it already. And Garth, we're so thrilled that you could join us today, thank you for being here.
Garth Lenz:
Well thank you Anna, it's wonderful to be back with my extended Crossroads family.
Anne Francis Bayless:
Likewise.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well thanks for coming Garth and to join Garth, we also have a systems scientist, Dr. Elizabeth Sawin is with us, joining us from her home in Vermont, I believe, is that right Beth?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
That's right.
Dr. Robert Davies:
And Beth is, as I just said a system scientist, and it's hard for me to judge these things now from a perspective of not knowing much about these things. But in my world, I consider her kind of a superstar, having studied with Donela Meadows, Anne, who pioneered a lot of this work in understanding the interaction between human systems and natural systems and trying to model it with limits to growth work from the early 1970s. Perhaps, Beth, you'll tell us a little bit more about that experience as well. Beth is also the co-director and co-founder of Climate Interactive, which is just an amazing tool for policymakers in particular, I think, are trying to figure out how to move their communities at all scales to a more sustainable and vibrant state. So welcome Beth, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah, thanks for having me, I'm looking forward to this conversation a lot.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So we're going to start the conversation with you Beth too, and I'm wondering if first let's maybe just tell us a little bit more about what it is you do and how you came to be doing it?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah, thank you. Well, I'm the co-director of an organization called Climate Interactive, as Rob said. So the main thing that we do is build computer simulations of issues like climate change and everything that it touches so health and food and water and all of these themes that you see in the Crossroads film actually. And the method that we use for that is something called system dynamics and that really is the touchstone to, Rob, what you just mentioned, the work of Donela Meadows and the other authors of the book, The Limits To Growth. So this was in 1972, basically grappling with the exact same questions that the film and the performance look at. We have a growing human ecological footprint on a finite planet, how do those two things resolve themselves, what's a path forward through it? That was the question of The Limits To Growth. One of the authors of The Limits To Growth was Donela Meadows, so she was a mentor of mine and my colleagues at Climate Interactive. In fact, we worked at the institute she founded, it was called The Sustainability Institute for almost 10 years and Climate Interactive was a project that started there and then became its own organization.
The only other thing I would throw in, because I think there is this professional and personal element to the film and to this moment that we all face, is another way Donela meadows influenced my life, is that she had the vision of a shared community farm and research institute back in the late 1990s, and she inspired me and my husband Phil to be among the first families who signed up for this idea. It's a place called Cobb Hill in Vermont, it's 23 families who share 280 acres, an organic farm, a forest, it's where my kids grew up. They've left home but they spent their whole childhoods here. So it's my personal part of a little experiment and of course there's as many ways to meet these challenges as there are people to try to meet them. But that informs, I guess the ideas I bring to this conversation, just as much as the science and the computer modeling and I wouldn't be surprised if I touch on both of those in the next hour.
Dr. Robert Davies:
I'm certainly hoping you will. Well, that sounds amazing and I, full disclosure I follow you on twitter and I'm a huge fan of your tweets and find them hugely both informing and also just entertaining, it's kind of a mix of system science and just showing us pictures of what you're harvesting. And for anyone out there who's listening, Beth was asking for an emoji for cauliflower the other day I think.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
That's true.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So if any of you have that with us. So Beth, one thing I want to start with, like I said, we've distilled an awful lot into this performance of course, this is obviously a very different way to communicate these topics in a science lecture or a course. And one of the things I definitely needed to leave out was the notion of feedback loops between the interconnected systems and I know this is something that you speak about often and have many thoughts on and I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about this notion of feedback loops and maybe even draw some connections with some of the things that are happening around us today.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah. Well, feedback loops are at the core of my field of systems thinking. And a feedback loop is just any time when a change in the world feeds back to change itself and so in fact in the film and in the clip that you showed at the beginning Rob, you have feedback loop of exponential growth, right, which is the thicker the piece of paper gets, the thicker it's going to get with the next fold. So that's what, in system language, we call a reinforcing feedback loop, so that's what drives that pattern of exponential growth. And in the clip you say, in nature, reinforcing feedback never continues forever, right? And the reason it doesn't is because of another kind of feedback which is balancing feedback. So if reinforcing feedback, it creates more and more change in the same direction, balancing feedback meets a change and brings systems back to balance. And of course, we know that our bodies operate through that, that's what homeostasis is, ecosystems operate that way, that's what the predator-prey balance is a balancing feedback loop.
And so the question that the Crossroads film brings to us really is, what are the balancing feedback loops that will bring this human system into balance again? And some of them we see pictures of in some of Garth's images, environmental destruction to the extent that it limits economies so when there's a natural disaster and it wipes out industrial capacity, that's a balancing feedback loop from the earth. And of course that comes with incredible suffering and loss and pain usually to the people who've done the least to create the impact in the first place. So you also talk about sacrifice zones in the film, in some cases, those are balancing feedback loops where we see say climate disasters, are those are earth system balancing feedback loops. What we're really looking for, of course, are chosen human balancing feedback loops where we decide to limit our environmental production, our environmental pollution. We decide to limit our consumption.
And there's amazing efforts on all of those fronts all the time of course, one that I know a lot about, is the UN Climate Change Talks, that happen every year, not this year because of COVID-19. That gave us the Paris Agreement which is all the countries on the face of the earth really deciding together to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas pollution, so that's a balancing feedback loop. So where we end up, from this moment, is going to depend on the net interaction of these reinforcing loops that are causing growth and the balancing loops that can slow them down. And a key part of a balancing loop, and maybe I'll leave my comments with this thought, a key part of a balancing loop is the sensing of a gap between a desired state and the actual state. And so we desire a stable climate, we desire thriving fisheries, healthy coral reefs, and the gap is the difference between the actual state and what we desire, and a feedback loop is something that closes that gap. And too much of the time, that process of either knowing what the gap is or taking action to close it, is often actively suppressed, right?
And so when we talk about climate denialists or distortions of environmental truth or hiding information, those are all efforts from some part of a system to subvert a balancing feedback loop. And one of the interventions to help bring us to safety is to make those balancing feedback loops work better and that's people who report, as Garth does, here's what's happening out of your view as you pump gas or buy groceries, here's what else is going on, that's really a gap-sensing mechanism. And then all of the social movements on the planet, of course, are taking information about that gap and using that information to create change, and that's bringing the balancing loop to full circle. So I hope that that gets at what you were hoping for a little bit on feedback.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Oh completely, because I think it's nice for people to know that actually the people who study these things have a systemic framework to analyze these... What's happening? And talk about it and try to identify, in a way that you just did, that is far less, let's say, political or divisive than our everyday cultural language talks about it. If we can get rid of that language and just say, basically what we have is these feedback loops, some of which are taking us where we don't want to go, some of which are trying to balance us, and then you just talked, and we'll maybe get into this a little bit more too about some of the corruption of that feedback loop in our information systems. And you brought in this role, of course, though that our cultural institutions have to play, which Garth, you have played a lot, so Anne, maybe I'll flip it to you to bring Garth into this.
Anne Francis Bayless:
Yeah, I want to circle back to sacrifice zones again which you referenced in passing Beth, but maybe first, before I give you that hot potato Garth, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about yourself also I gave kind of your formal intro, but we'd love to hear a little bit more from you.
Garth Lenz:
Well, I'm a photojournalist and fine art photographer and almost all of my work is looking at conservation issues, particularly the impact of massive natural resource extraction projects and the impacts that those have on Indigenous people, because it seems invariably, wherever I go in in the world, it seems that the the land and the people who are impacted most by these massive projects tend to be Indigenous people, tend to be the people that are not getting any kind of the benefits from them, so they're they're paying the price and they're not getting the benefit. So that has been a very very major focus of my work over the years, beginning in earlier years, with looking at issues around forests and the last few years, much more focused on climate change and fossil fuel resource extraction and issues around energy.
Anne Francis Bayless:
So it came up a moment ago about the role of documentation in all of this and so to go really to the personal, we've talked about this notion of sacrifice zones already a little bit in passing and this is certainly something that Rob and the members of the quartet have thought about a lot and talked about a lot, read about a lot. But you have spent a lot of time with your boots on the ground, so to speak, and you've spent a lot of time with these people. You mentioned the Indigenous peoples who are usually disproportionately affected by this and so if you would, maybe share with us a little bit how that has shaped your work going forward, how it's impacted you being able to actually interact with these folks year after year.
Garth Lenz:
Yeah, I mean you realize that behind the sort of the large-scale landscape images of the devastation, there are all these incredibly painful human stories, whether that's in the chemical valley which is in Southwestern Ontario, near Sarnia, where you have, I believe it is 60 or 70 large fineries and petrochemical plants within about a 5x15 mile corridor surrounding a First Nations Reserve of Aamjiwnaang, this is an area that National Geographic called the most polluted place in North America with astronomical rates of cancer and signs of significant endocrine disruption amongst the population, to obviously the Alberta Tar Sands where I spent a lot of time, has also figured very, very prominently in my work. People there, the land and the water is being polluted, they can no longer eat the same the fish that they used to be able to, rare forms of cancer are skyrocketing in other parts of Northern Canada, In my TED Talk, one of the examples I give is a First Nations Person lending the boat to go down the Peace River into Wood Buffalo National Park and telling me not to eat the fish from there, and yet on his front porch seeing five or six large fish that he obviously had to feed his family. And particularly in many of these remote communities, food is extraordinarily expensive, it all has to be flown in, the economies are doing very, very poorly, very high rates of unemployment.
And you think of the... We talk a lot about the ecological costs but the social costs, the social costs of creating a situation where in one of the richest countries in the world, the people who, this is all of their land, we're tourists really compared to populations that have been here 5,000 to 10,000 years and they're being forced into a situation where either their families go hungry or they're forced to feed them poisonous, potentially carcinogenic foods that they would never even consider, would caution us against eating. And I think, as a parent, to be put in that kind of a place is just phenomenally painful, and that this happens in countries like Canada and the United States and others, which are extremely wealthy, it's almost like a crime against humanity, well it is a crime against humanity.
So obviously, that really affects my work very, very greatly. Oftentimes things are twisted by the proponents of some of these major projects. Oftentimes they will boast in the fact that First Nations Communities have signed on to co-management agreements, and I've certainly talked with individuals from those communities and they have basically said that they have a hard choice to make. They have maybe, if a new pipeline or a new massive mine or some other kind of project is going into their onto their treaty lands, they have one chance to sign on, sort of hold their nose and see the destruction of their traditional lands. But in part of that bargain, perhaps they have a chance to give their children the same kinds of access to education, to even clean water, which is many, many first nations reserves in Canada do not even have access to clean drinking water, to equal access to education and health care, to employment opportunities, all of these things that in the rest of the country, we just take absolutely for granted.
So I think, until across the country and across Indigenous communities, only when they have that kind of free access, can one really say that they signed on to some of these projects with free and informed consent. And of course, many within these communities, do not wish to sign on to these projects for all of the social and ecological costs related. And so you have a major division between these communities and it is the strength of that community that has really allowed those communities to survive so much of the hardship which has been imposed upon them by our colonial life lifestyle and political system.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So Garth, I wonder, what I want to do now is maybe just, I want to show some of the images that appear in the Crossroads performance from yours. We used quite a number of your images and I think I want to draw some contrast. So this slide shows some of the images that we use that are just the natural world, the natural beauty and maybe you can briefly tell us about where these are.
Garth Lenz:
Sure, the upper left image is actually of Chesapeake Bay and this is showing the rising tides there which is engulfing wetlands and islands and even some existing communities. The next image going clockwise is of the Boreal Forest, that's in Northern Saskatchewan. And the Boreal Forest is the most effective terrestrial carbon sink on the planet and Canada's Boreal Forest actually sequester about twice as the amount of carbon per acre or hectare as a tropical rainforest do. Beside that, we have an image of where the Boreal meets the Coastal Mountains and we then descend into the other side into the Great Bear Rainforest on the West Coast of Canada, this is an area where a pipeline for tar sands crude was proposed to go through the Boreal and into the Great Bear Rainforest where it would cause many, many problems and have to go through a jigsaw puzzle of fjords and some of the most difficult to navigate waters on the planet.
The next image is a leaf decaying in Borneo. This is actually an area too where I traveled for three days I guess, up the Mahakam River to live with some Dayak people who, two generations ago, were still practicing very traditional Dayak culture, actually still are, and where a number of mines have been imposed upon the population there. In one particular situation, one of the villages had refused the mine and then this was under the Suharto Rule, the military had come in and basically started firing machine guns all over the place until everybody just fled for their lives. And the final image is an aerial over a wetland actually very, very near the Alberta Tar Sands or Oil Sands, as you're sometimes referred to.
Dr. Robert Davies:
And then we have another series, so those were the natural world, as it basically is without humans. And we've got this collection of photographs and I know there are some people who will be listening to this who don't have the videos so Garth maybe you'll describe these images as well.
Garth Lenz:
Yeah, again going from the top left corner is a tar mine in the Alberta Tar Sands, and if you're looking at that you would actually see a tiny little speck which is a truck which is about the same size as a two-story 3000 square foot home, vast area of devastation. Beside that, similar sort of image, tar mine at night. Again in the far, far distance you can see the largest sulfur heaps on the planet, that's a byproduct of the refining process. Beside that you have a upgrader or refinery in the Tar Sands showing some of the huge amount of effluent. I mean obviously what you're seeing here is steam, but in that steam are some of the most carcinogenic compounds found on the planet. Those are going into the air and also into the water, which is the next two images as you sort of go along the counterclockwise circle.
These are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet, can be seen from outer space. The largest of these are about two-thirds of the entire island of Manhattan and there's about 40 of these now existing on either side of the Athabasca River and their toxins are are draining into the Athabasca River and into the Indigenous populations downstream, and a very large amount of toxins are also now being found through recent studies are occurring in the spring runoff and melt and what's this indicating is that many of these toxins are also making their way into the atmosphere and then descending in the form of precipitation.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So I think we'll come back to... So thank you Garth. I mean one of the things that of course, Anne and I have talked about, and you just said in your comments is that, some of these images are themselves kind of beautiful, not just kind of, when you when you first look at them, they're quite striking, as almost beautiful, until you understand what it is you're you're looking at.
Garth Lenz:
Yeah, could we go back to the last slide and perhaps there's the central lower image there with the sky reflected in the tailings ponds with the the big white puffy clouds I actually sell this as a fine art print and I've named it, I've Looked At Clouds From Both Sides Now, in honor of Joni Mitchell. In any event, sometimes people will say, I've had actually other photojournalists say that I'm making these scenes look too beautiful, that I'm sort of glamorizing this devastation which is certainly the farthest thing from my intention when I photograph, particularly from the air, it's really a very, very intuitive kind of process. But I actually think that though those images, for instance that image there, where you can see the clouds and the sky reflected in the toxins, it really kind of expresses I think, the cognitive dissonance of our society in that, as much as we think it's horrible, all these impacts, the social impacts, the environmental impacts, as a result of our addiction to fossil fuels, and the ensuing climate change and global warming.
At the same time, we all enjoy their benefits, and we find it very, very difficult to kind of tear ourselves away from those benefits. Now, some of that is a result of just the institutionalized system and infrastructure that we live in that make it very difficult. But even on a purely personal level, every day today, I think we're faced with this dilemma between the values of how much we know is wrong with this in our relationship with those and all the luxuries and the conveniences that they've provided. And I also think that photography and an image of a disturbing thing which has some aesthetic beauty is a sort of a non-confrontational way, a non-polarizing way we can pull people into that conversation. They can look at those images, they can enjoy them, and then they can understand what their what they're looking at and come to their own conclusions about some of these.
And I just think that, invariably, I find the conclusions that we come to from not under pressure, whether it's observing the data or observing the visual data or listening to the music, that the responses and the feelings and the conclusions that we come from doing that are so much stronger than anything I or anyone else can sort of tell tell someone. So I think that's one of the ways that art can really inform these conversations.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Well, thank you Garth. So I guess we'll just... I mean, so eloquently stated, you've clearly done this many times. I mean, you've had many, many conversations I know with people. And Beth, you as well, in talking about these things from this more maybe clinical standpoint of system science. So Beth, I'm wondering, just as you watched the film and as you've listened to Garth, I mean, what is the role really of culture in closing that gap and taking us from the state we're in to the state we want to be?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah. What this reminds me of is, I've been teaching people about the earth system and climate change for a long time. I started in the late '90s going around to church basements and auditoriums with a slideshow about climate change and this was a time when it was much less in the popular consciousness and I made people cry, people left the room they couldn't handle what the scientific kind of evidence that was coming out and that was of course the opposite impact of what I wanted to have. I was trying to mobilize people to take action and I seem to be shutting them down and paralyzing them, and so I actually came to a point where I was like, no more, I'm not going to give this presentation until I learn a different way of engaging and I put it on the shelf for a while.
One thing I did is I went and studied with Joanna and Fran Macy. Their work, it's often called the work that reconnects, and it is based on the premise that our fear and grief and anger about the state of the world is so strong and our, at least american culture, labels those all as negative emotions and teaches us to suppress them to not express them. And what Joanna Macy's work is all about is actually those emotions have intelligence for us, right? We're organisms on a planet in crisis, we should be afraid, we should be rageful, we should be paying attention, fear tells it tells us to wake up and pay attention, anger tells us there's something precious we need to defend.
And so that initial work with Joanna really has become a strand of my work ever since, is to try to understand how to create the experiences where people can process those emotions and then of course convert them to action. Because the problem is that, in the weight of those emotions, especially without a way to understand them and without the solidarity of others, it's really easy to shut down. And so to circle to your question, Rob, I think part of the role of culture and the humanities is they provide us ways to process this information. And I know watching the film, I was so grateful for each interlude, Anna, of the string quartet, which allowed, I think, the time and space for me to absorb more than intellectually, whatever it was that that had just been presented, and I think Garth's images do the same thing.
And also the images of course that remind us of how beautiful this planet is and as far as we know, the only place in the universe like this. So we talk, in my field sometimes, about the creative tension between what the current reality is and what is possible still? And that we think that part of the skill of effective action in this time is to put ourselves in that creative tension. You can avoid the tension if you don't face how bad it is. You can also avoid the tension if you don't allow yourself to believe that something better is possible. But if you can simultaneously face the truth and see what the film turns to toward the end of a transformed society, it's painful to live in that gap but that's also where the action is and the potential for change is.
Anne Francis Bayless:
Well Beth, you're making you think about something that I was really struck by in reading a little bit about your work, which is this notion of what you call multi-solving? Which I found really powerful and I wonder if you would just speak a little bit about that and how it sort of relates back to what you were just saying?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah, I'm always happy to talk about multi-solving. It's a word that I invented but of course it expresses an idea that all human beings do all the time. I think of my grandmother who faced great poverty in the Depression in the United States, who could make anything she did serve many purposes at the same time, That's what multi-solving is, it's the idea that when we face converging crises we actually, if we're skillful at it, can invest our time and our money and our intention in these actions that solve multiple problems at the same time, and I find examples are the best way to convey it. So a very simple example is, imagine replacing a coal-fired power plant near a city with green energy like wind and solar. So for the long term, of course, you're reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so you're improving the climate situation. But in the short term, you're reducing air pollution from the coal-fired power plant, and so the cases of childhood asthma in that neighborhood near the power plant are going to go down, the cardiovascular health of the people in the community, the number of premature births, all of these things are actually linked very strongly to air pollution and they'll get better right away, while the climate will be protected decades from now.
And in fact this health and climate intersection is so strong, in 2018, the World Health Organization came out with a report that said, the costs of being on track to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement would be completely offset by the savings to health systems around the world. Very few people really... Rob, I think of such an important theme in the film is, it's time to believe what we know. So there's another example, there is amazing possibility that we know that we don't actually believe, right? We don't actually believe that we could make a better world at an affordable price. But everything that we know about the health and climate intersection says that's really true.
Dr. Robert Davies:
And now that, of course, the challenge is getting us all to really imagine how that works, and kind of I think I always feel like this is what, one of the things that culture does for us is allow us to try on a whole different world for a while, like a film or a book, and wear it around and we insert ourselves as we're watching and that we're reading and maybe it's a world in which we don't have all of these problems and we get to actually maybe imagine gee, maybe it is possible to do that, maybe it is possible to live. All these things that we normally think of as, oh there's no way we'll get rid of fossil fuels or there's no way that you could convince the world to eat less meat or at least industrialized agriculture in this way. But then if you're just able to try on and wear it around for a while, I feel like it helps make it more real for us. So that's the power I find in that.
Garth Lenz:
And of course, countries are starting to make that change, while we in North America, sort of debate these things. I know, Rob, that you had a statistic about, I think, the amount of solar power and the percentage of energy that Germany is deriving from that now, some sort of statistic like that, I know in the past that I was very impressed by. And Beth, you were talking about you know air quality issues and I forget the statistic but the number of people that have died as a result of toxic air pollution, of which so much is fossil fuels, is absolutely astronomical. I mean it's comparable to... I believe it is more than we're losing from all other kinds of diseases.
And one of the things that sort of gave me some hope was, during the height of the pandemic, I mean I guess we're back in the new height again, but during the first wave, you start to hear about blue sky over Beijing and dolphins coming into the Venice canals and how quickly the planet can heal itself, and that's not sort of a recipe for putting this off more because obviously certain things come back very quickly and other things like the climate are going to take much longer to come back. But the point is that, well, when we stop making everything worse, the planet has this incredible ability to heal itself if we just give it half a chance. And of course, when the planet heals itself, our communities and our lives and our health also improves and gets healed.
Anne Francis Bayless:
I have often found myself wondering, are we going to learn any kind of long term lessons from this, exactly along the lines of what you're describing, Garth, that I mean, speaking in a tiny example of just the way that life has changed for example for me in my role as a teacher at a University, even as a music teacher for whom being in the same room together being live together to experience performances together is so vital, and yet there's been a lot that we were able to change, a lot of ways in which we could be flexible, in order to kind of live by these new rules and I would just be curious really for any of the three of you, but Beth maybe to start with you, do you see this as potentially being an opportunity and are you seeing signs that people might be taking these opportunities going forward?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Yeah, there's enormous opportunity and I think we're only taking a tiny, tiny fraction of it actually. One of the biggest opportunities is the trillions of dollars, it's estimated about 12 trillion dollars governments around the world have pledged for economic recovery in response to the pandemic. There was just research published in Science, The Journal which said that for about 10% of that 12 trillion dollars, the world could be for the next four or five years on the path to beat the Paris Agreement Goals. And just to be clear, we're not on that path, and also most likely that 12 trillion is not being invested even that 10% in the way that we need. But it gives you a sense of actually how achievable that is, right? And although it's a tiny percent of how that stimulus is being spent so far. My colleagues and I at Climate Interactive are really carefully tracking a small subset. We're looking at the projects that we say are green, resilient, and equitable. So they lock in low-carbon economies, they help people respond to climate impacts, and they do it in a way where the benefits and the burdens are equitably shared. And while it's a tiny percentage overall, each of those bright spots is an example really of what's possible.
And so those are things like, in Nigeria, a program to provide solar panels to villages that may not have access to the electricity grid. So they're replacing diesel and kerosene, kids have light to study for school at night, the air pollution is reduced, that's one example. In the UK, there's a huge investment in the infrastructure for cycling, we see this in many cities around the world. It's both to help essential workers get around during the pandemic, but those of course will be investments that will remain afterwards. In the UK, we understand that you can do things like bring in your old bike from the shed and get a free tune up so that you can start commuting to work on your bicycle and that's part of their COVID-19 recovery. Cities in the US are somewhat of a bright spot for this. Here in Vermont, the municipal electric utility in Burlington has a green stimulus program that includes low-income home weatherization and electric car infrastructure. So imagine that scaled up to 12 trillion dollars, that would transform the world in the direction that we need to go.
Dr. Robert Davies:
This is tailor-made for multi-solving.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Exactly, I mean when you face so many crises at the same time, you can't afford to tackle them individually, right? It's too expensive monetarily and politically your coalition for each priority is too weak, right? You have the health interests and the climate interests. In all of these types of projects, those intersect. But, by and large, these are decisions that are made by different ministries or different jurisdictions, they're funded by different grant makers. People generally don't, even if they see the potential for overlap, they don't have the flexibility in their jobs or their funding streams to work together in this way. So we think one of the biggest investments is upfront to support the kind of integration and relationship building that allows people to actually take advantage of these opportunities, so they're not just theoretical but they actually can come into being.
Dr. Robert Davies:
So this is the real trip right, I mean this is, Beth, when you were talking about your early days of giving talks and having people just overcome with despair essentially, I certainly resonated with that, your path sounds a lot like mine in my early days of doing this, which was a little bit, I started doing this until 2007. But we have this state that we're in and we have the state that we want to be in, and by and large, we know what it looks like, what a sustainable and a just in a vibrant world, we kind of know the bones of that I think, and feel free to, don't let me put words in your mouth, but I think we know the basics of how to have an energy system, and a food system, and an economic system that accomplishes those things. And what we don't seem to be able to know how to do is to get ourselves to do it.
And Beth and Garth, I've heard you both talk about this notion of a world view and a perspective, and change in that perspective. So one thing we have to do of course is change the systems. But those systems emerge from who we are and what we choose to value. And so I'm wondering that notion of what do either of you have to say about getting us to move forward. I'm stumbling because I don't want to put it on you, if you knew the answer exactly of course we'd all be through this, but the question of course is how do we change our world views? How do we get these new systems to emerge? And I'm wondering where you both are you're thinking of that?
Garth Lenz:
I think and you mentioned this a little bit in that that triptych image we might look at a little bit later but I think that so much of our infrastructure that keeps us trapped in this kind of endless cycle of consumption of fossil fuels and then destroying more of the natural environment and compromising our health that, that infrastructure was, much of that was created by the opportunities made possible only through cheap abundant fossil fuel energy. Now that cheap abundant fossil fuel energy is kind of coming to its end and we're starting to realize, especially as the commodity itself becomes more expensive, and as we start to factor in the ecological, the social, the health costs, we realize that cheap energy is not very cheap at all. Particularly when we also factor in the fact that the fossil fuel energy and these corporations, the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed on the planet, are receiving 10 times the kind of subsidies that alternative energy, that is the way to the future are receiving.
The only reason we can afford to fill up our vehicles and it not cost an astronomical amount is because it's so heavily subsidized. In Europe, where I gather there's less subsidization and there's much higher gas, there's also many, many fewer people driving cars per capita, I suspect, and much greater use of alternative transportation. So, we need that, I think that massive kind of systemic infrastructure change and I think that when people have the opportunities to make those kinds of choices and they're viable for what they need to do to live and work and get their families from A to B and earn a living, that people will choose them. But such massive energy has been put towards preventing us from even being able to make to have those kinds of choices.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
Thanks Garth. I have a couple of thoughts on that too. I agree with a lot that you just said, Garth, for sure. I have two answers, I guess, to your question, Rob. One, this also was a long time ago probably 2005 or so, I was teaching in a leadership fellows program for global sustainability leaders and I was teaching about the need for a paradigm shift, this was the language that I was using and one of the fellows in this program was a really inspiring woman who ran a feminist radio station in Nicaragua, she had been part of the Sandinista Movement, and she kind of raised her hand when I started talking about paradigms and she was like, "It's not so much that we need a paradigm shift is that we need to turn to the paradigms that have always been here and that more than half of the world's people still hold." And I think she probably would have maybe labeled that as an Indigenous paradigm.
And so I think one of the things that white westerners like me are becoming more and more aware of is that Indigenous epistemologies and ways of knowing economies and food production systems that can last for 30,000 or 40,000 years haven't gone away, those cultural and knowledge traditions are being held by people around the world. So that's one of my answers to how do we have a worldview change, part of it is we change who we pay attention to and who we support.
The second one is a little bit more back to this issue of feedback loops. There are two reinforcing feedback loops, so remember those are the ones where change feeds upon itself and gets bigger and bigger, it's very small until it's not, as you said, Rob. There's a there's a book by Thomas Kuhn called, The Theory of Scientific Revolutions and he looked at how paradigms in science change. But I think we can apply it to world views or paradigms in society and he found these two reinforcing feedback loops that tear down a paradigm that's not serving and build up one that is. So the tearing down loop is that, based on something he called anomalies. So these are the things that are happening that aren't explained by the paradigm that exists, the dominant one. And so each of Garth's pictures of child labor and pits of toxic chemicals is an anomaly, right? If this western colonial worldview were working, we would be healthy and happy and we wouldn't be destroying our planet.
And what Kuhn found was that when a paradigm is strong, people actually reject the evidence of anomalies more than they reject the paradigm. And that's probably part of what's allowed us to get so deeply into this is that we believe we're living in the best possible way and we can't even see the ways that we're not. But eventually, the anomalies accumulate to such a degree because the world view is out of step with the world, it's just going to keep making anomalies worse and worse and worse. More and more people face them and they lose confidence in the world view. And the thing he found was that, as more people have less confidence, more anomalies become apparent. So you can see how that gains momentum, right? That something that looks incredibly strong is actually about to falter under the weight of the anomalies.
And so think about the great transitions like the falling of the Berlin Wall, where no one could predict exactly when it happened and it seemed to happen just out of nowhere, that's kind of the kind of thing that's driven by this feedback loop. And the second feedback loop is what brings a new world view into prominence, and it too has this reinforcing feedback dynamic. So in that one, people experiment with new world views and they solve problems, and the solving of the problems builds confidence in the new world view, which leads to even more people experimenting solving even more problems building even more confidence. And so that's the flowering of experiments on earth right now, it's ecological food production, it's permaculture, it's worker-owned cooperatives, it's social movements, it's certain new technologies, it's new ways of making decisions and governance. And those things too will have that pattern of it looks like nothing is changing until suddenly it bursts into fullness, right, that's what exponential growth does.
And so even in these dark times when things seem really scary, those two feedback loops should remind us to just keep going and just keep plugging along because we're part of this unseen process of change feeding upon itself that can create transformation, which seems pretty clearly to me what we're after. Slow incremental change isn't going to cut it anymore, we're looking for transformation.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Wow. I mean that point is so perfectly said, the amplifying feedbacks can also take us too good changes as well as to destructive change. Anne, and I don't know about you, I'm willing to keep going for another hour or so.
Anne Francis Bayless:
I know, I wish we could, there's so much to talk about, this has been fascinating.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:
I'm good.
Anne Francis Bayless:
Yeah, thank you both.
Garth Lenz:
Thank you, wonderful to be a part of it.
Dr. Robert Davies:
Thank you, yes, for joining us and I'll just give a plug one more time, Garth Lenz, you can find him online in many places, google the name, you'll find his website is TED Talks. The same with Dr. Elizabeth Sawin. I've personally found you both tremendous resources for going forward with my own work. And so thanks again for joining us and Anne, and I guess we have a few more people to thank.
Anne Francis Bayless:
We do indeed yeah thanks Rob. So for the 2020 and 2021 NOVA Season Sponsors, we would not be able to present this without them. We thank the Utah Legislature and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums, the Lawrence T. & Janet T. Dee Foundation, the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks, the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, iZotope, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, the Cultural Vision Fund, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Thank you to all those organizations and again thank you Beth and Garth for the inspiration today.
Announcer:
This has been the NOVA Podcast. Our hosts were Robert Davies and Anne Francis Bayless. Our guests were Elizabeth Sawin and Garth Lenz. This episode was produced by Chris Meyers. Next time, we warp up the Crossroads Series by taking with two artists who use their work to explore the idea of a sustainable world. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and playwright Chantal Bilodeau join us on our next episode. The NOVA Podcast is funded by listeners like you. You can donate to support NOVA's programming at novaslc.org. Don't forget to subscribe and share the NOVA Podcast with your friends, we'll see you next time.