00:00:56.400Hello, and welcome to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical ideas relating to earth renewal.
00:01:03.600On this program, we speak with authors of many disciplines, activists, cultural figures, mystics, philosophers, scientists, and other weavers of vision for an ecologically based society.
00:01:17.240Today, it's a thrill to be speaking with Dr. Kurt Steger about his 2011 book, Deep Future, The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth.
00:01:26.400and his brand new book, Your Atomic Self,
00:01:29.620The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything in the Universe.
00:01:34.040Kurt Steger has a PhD in biology and geology from Duke University.
00:01:39.720He has published more than three dozen climate and ecology-related articles
00:01:43.780in major journals, including science and quaternary research,
00:01:48.900and has written for popular audiences in periodicals such as National Geographic.
00:01:53.680He teaches at St. Paul's College in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and he holds a research associate post at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, where he investigates the long-term history of climate in Africa, South America, and the polar regions.
00:02:12.180He has also produced Natural Selections, a weekly radio short on North County Public Radio for the last 25 years in New York.
00:02:20.620Thank you for being on the program, Kurt.
00:11:31.860What a horrible, horrible disaster that would be.
00:11:34.760And what sustains that is the human version of ecology.
00:11:38.840It's civilization, where we all interconnect just like other parts of any ecosystem and sustain all of our lives.
00:11:47.440And so I feel like we need to see our place in the big picture so that we don't damage the environment that we need to keep us alive
00:11:55.620and see the value and the connectedness to the rest of the species and the rest of the ecosystems
00:12:00.560so that we don't destroy one while trying to favor ourselves.
00:12:06.620But right now, basically, we're running around with, you could say, heavy equipment blindfolded,
00:12:12.600not realizing what we're damaging and what we're about to run into with all this stuff.
00:12:17.760We need to open our eyes and learn how to do this in a conscious level.
00:12:22.320And science is our clearest window on this truth.
00:12:25.760So, again, getting back to the basics, I feel like even the struggle of getting people to acknowledge that science is so important,
00:12:34.160a very precious gift, not just for our civilization and our technology, but now for the whole planet.
00:12:41.080I feel like that's an important mission and an important challenge.
00:12:46.160A really neat thing you wrote about is how plants and fungi are constantly excreting enzymes that
00:12:52.020break down rock. And apparently every year, 20 billion metric tons of rock is broken down and
00:12:59.400washed a sea. According to one article you reference, the continents are being ground down
00:13:05.560in this way so much that Earth's molten mantle churns more violently. What are the long-term
00:13:12.860implications of this? Could the continents theoretically grind away ad infinitum,
00:13:19.760except where volcanoes can form new land? Yeah, it just makes the world an amazing place.
00:13:26.620If you can see this connection of something as small and slow as lichens slowly grinding down the face of a boulder when you're walking past it in the woods and seeing what that adds up to, like you said, it can change the circulation of the earth's mantle and the drifting and erosion of continents.
00:13:47.300So that is pretty amazing, but as you continue along that path of kind of grasping what that's all about,
00:13:54.140you realize, well, this is actually what has been happening ever since life's been on Earth.
00:14:00.400We've had the continents drifting around, and you can even look up maps of where we think they were
00:14:06.220and what they used to look like and things like that, too.
00:14:09.900So this actually is what it's like living on a partially molten planet.
00:14:13.520And you can even look at, if you hunt around online on this topic, you could find maps of where the continents are likely to be in a million, 10 million, 100 million years as well.
00:14:24.100So that story's not over by any means.
00:14:27.680I live on the West Coast, and I'm completely in love with the temperate rainforest.
00:14:32.580forest. There's the largest trees in the world here, although only a few percent have been spared
00:14:40.240the furious logging of the last century and a half. British Columbia has by far the largest
00:14:47.280remaining ancient forest, with 53 million acres relatively untouched in the very steep, wet
00:14:54.960coastal mountains. You know, all the rain helps, but the real growth factor is the compost. Every
00:15:01.740year, salmon spawn up countless rivers and streams to lay their eggs and die. And their nitrogen-rich
00:15:08.500flesh ends up in the trees. So can you explain this incredible process and how we can reconstruct
00:15:17.200the history of salmon through tree rings and lake sediment analysis? And from that research,
00:15:24.400Are there any clues about the current decline of salmon?
00:15:29.280Sure. I was just blown away by the ability to trace the atoms from the ocean into the fish,
00:15:38.800then up the rivers, into the bears that eat the salmon,
00:15:43.020and then the other things that eat the wastes and the leftover salmon pieces,
00:16:31.400When salmon would come up and spawn in the lakes,
00:16:34.580their atoms would remain in those sediments too,
00:16:36.860and you can count them back even farther than the tree rings.
00:16:40.100So this then leads from exploring the atomic world to exploring deep time again,
00:16:47.100because some of these cores go back thousands of years.
00:16:50.620And the study you referenced had a really, really interesting finding, which is, if you look at what we normally consider to be long-term, oh, the last few decades, we've got this decline in salmon.
00:17:02.740And you may remember hearing stories maybe from older folks or Native American traditions saying, oh, in the old days, the salmons were so numerous you could walk across the river on their backs, things like that.
00:17:15.100So we say, well, gosh, the normal state was millions of salmon, and now we're losing it, so it's got to be us.
00:17:20.620And that's probably true in this case, but if you look over the long term, you find out about 2,000 years ago, there was a gigantic drop in the nitrogen-15 concentrations in the lake sediments, and the most reasonable conclusion is the salmon almost disappeared way back then for centuries, which then raises a really interesting question.
00:17:44.880Number one is, well, gosh, you know, what made that happen?
00:17:49.280And we still don't know to this day why that happened.
00:20:04.940so in theory you should be able to trace where they go just like the salmon nitrogen and in fact
00:20:09.560we can so by doing just a little bookkeeping these folks are measuring where the carbon will go
00:20:18.000and how long it takes and the most obvious place first of all is the oceans because water absorbs
00:20:24.740gases from the air so most of it's going to end up in the oceans between three quarters and four
00:20:31.300fifths of it the rest is going to be stranded in the air kind of like leftovers from a big old
00:20:38.280banquet when the oceans are full of it and will slowly be reacting with rocks and soils on the
00:20:45.920dry land and taking the carbon out of the air that way and slowly washing that back into the
00:20:51.460oceans with rivers and such kind of like an antacid pill so the ocean can take up the last bits
00:20:57.640So those are the two places, the oceans mostly, a little bit on land that then delivers it to the ocean.
00:21:03.380But the most shocking thing is how long it takes.
00:21:06.840So for the oceans to absorb most of the stuff until they can't take anymore is on the order,
00:21:12.380not just of decades, the end of the century, it's thousands of years.
00:21:17.800And the reactions with the rocks and the soils is tens of thousands of years to finish that job.
00:21:26.960So when you add it all together, the choices we're going to make in the next few decades are, if you want to simplify it, you could say we either switch from these fossil fuels quickly, in which case we won't release all of the fossil carbon that's here into the air, or if we go ahead as we basically are now and just go and go and go until we have to switch because we burned it all, depending on which of those two choices we make.
00:21:53.140either way we're still going to have to switch from fossil fuels but if we take another century
00:21:58.780or two and burn the stuff the difference is enormous the the least impact we would have is
00:22:06.320the quick switch in which case things probably won't come back to the way they are now for
00:22:12.260between 50,000 and 100,000 years and that's the mild case so it's virtually permanent on a human
00:22:20.800scale. But if we go the profligate route and burn as much as we can and then are forced to switch
00:22:28.060later, the impacts are much, much larger. We'll set in motion other processes that amplify those
00:22:35.520changes, and the recovery probably won't be complete until maybe half a million years in the
00:22:42.020future. It's fascinating, depressing, and exhilarating all at once. I find it fascinating
00:22:49.040as a scientist, it's like, wow, how can you even figure this stuff out?
00:22:51.800But, oh, my gosh, study after study shows it.
00:22:54.720And, of course, it even makes common sense when you really think about it.
00:22:58.260And then the depressing thing is, oh, my gosh, what have we done?
00:23:02.420That this is so huge, and it's big, too big for most of us to grasp
00:23:07.900because we're not used to thinking in these big numbers.
00:23:10.960And it's so huge it moves slowly on our time frame,
00:23:14.340which makes it easy to think it's not happening.
00:23:16.200like there's no urgency because i can't see it happening well you know every decade we continue
00:23:22.740just amplifies this effect for thousands of years and the exhilarating part gets me back to this
00:23:29.880civilization thing and seeing our place in the world you once you kind of get over the shock
00:23:35.760you say well gosh you know look at the huge impacts we're having without even trying we're
00:23:42.320not doing this on purpose it's happening blindly can you imagine the power we have to do the right
00:23:47.500thing if we know what's going on see our place and do the right thing and there's this great
00:23:53.840quote that i think sums it up it's from the 1800s a scientist called thomas henry huxley
00:23:58.960he was involved in a controversy of his day which was darwin and evolution and he was defending
00:24:05.460darwinism and people said well why do you even like this topic you know when you argue it just
00:24:10.280upsets people, which is what you might say about climate change, right?
00:24:14.360But he said, we have to know what is true in order to do what is right.
00:24:20.820And I feel like that's a great motto for us to really face facts, see how powerful we've
00:24:27.880become, maybe be a little scared by the effects we have on the planet, but not be paralyzed
00:24:43.800We are in this amazing time in Earth history.
00:24:47.360Literally, the generations of people on Earth today are going to make decisions
00:24:51.480that are going to echo on down into the future for tens of thousands of years.
00:24:56.440So that means every single one of us is hugely important.
00:25:00.180and we're interconnected into this global system of an empowered human race.
00:25:07.820So literally, the contents of our hearts and our minds are huge forces of nature.
00:25:16.600And so therefore, just simply, like I said, cleaning up and focusing what's in our heads and knowing what's going on is really, really important.
00:25:26.180so much of the climate denial and failure to act comes from you know a lack of clarity on where
00:25:34.780we're headed the predictions vary wildly you know should we be preparing for a temperature spike or
00:25:42.060you know a polar vortex induced ice age what is your current thinking on where the climate
00:25:47.940it is heading this century? Well, the current thinking is, although, you know, when you have
00:25:55.920a weird year of weather, it makes headlines. And sometimes the weird weather fits the big picture,
00:26:01.840like, oh, you have these hurricanes, you know, that you'd probably expect some of those from
00:26:06.180a warmer world. And yet now we've got like wicked cold, right? So how's that fit? You can take this
00:26:11.080short term thing, people are talking about, oh, did global warming stop in recent years? You know,
00:28:02.840But the ideas of triggering an ice age and things, those are from movies and some ideas which are sort of taken out of context from the scientific literature.
00:28:14.700There was one cool event in the North Atlantic, for example, near the end of the last ice age from some giant flooding events from Meltwater.
00:28:21.920And it did cool things in certain parts of like Europe and stuff.
00:28:25.300But that was, you know, way blown out of proportion kind of in the storytelling modes.
00:28:32.840So by mid-century, we're going to definitely see that we're in a state of warming.
00:28:39.820Oh, yeah. I mean, you can sort of sense it now, but people like Jim Hansen get a lot of credit or blame, you could say, for being the first to announce that global warming is real.
00:28:50.780He may turn out to be right, but that was not a scientifically well-supported, solid claim.
00:28:56.520He was gambling on that, but to really have it nailed down as there's no question,
00:31:03.960Only now, it's permanent virtually because the sea level's coming up and is going to be doing it for centuries.
00:31:12.580And so progressively, on average, the flood events from hurricanes and things are just going to get farther and farther and farther inland.
00:31:21.000You're living on borrowed time if you build on beaches now.
00:31:24.600I remember maybe a few months ago, there was a National Geographic map.
00:31:29.180They had this huge pullout map inside that was showing time increments and sea level rise around the world.
00:31:40.420It's a lesson learned or will be learned.
00:31:43.240Yeah, it's a matter of life and death to not think long term in those habitats, especially to not realize that it's not a question of if, but when the big one is going to come.
00:32:45.240Going back to the topic of the temperature rise, what do you make of James Lovelock's theory that the Earth could tip to a hot state that's inhospitable to intelligent life?
00:33:01.160Well, if you look at the facts and figures that I present in the book, I went through a large part of the scientific peer-reviewed literature on this to get these estimates of the warming.
00:33:15.260And Lovelock's original estimates of it killing billions of people,
00:33:19.300even he has backed away from those now.
00:33:22.600Jimmy Hansen also had a thing called the Venus Syndrome,
00:33:25.560which he put in his book, what is it, Storms of My Grandchildren, I think it's called,
00:42:07.480Maybe those rain belts would be pushed off the northern part of the continent
00:42:10.920into the Mediterranean or up into Europe.
00:42:12.640So these are just things that we can only speculate about, but common-sense, broad-brush things like that maybe are better than some of the models right now.
00:42:23.300If hypothetically the Amazon dried up in the next few decades, and then rainfall patterns changed, and it became water again, would the biodiversity return, or would we be looking at a novel ecosystem with a less diverse species composition?
00:42:42.640Well, you can't have the trees without the water.
00:42:45.780But it's important to remember, again, if you have this picture of us being in this new epoch of Earth's history,
00:42:54.320We've had dry times and wet times before.
00:42:56.460We've had hot times and cold times before.
00:42:58.160What's different is we are all over the planet with our technology and our settlements and our interconnectedness.
00:43:04.520So in the old days, if you had a massive climatic shift, which did happen in the Amazon and did happen in the rainforest of West Africa, it was the last ice age.
00:43:17.300When it got cooler on average, the monsoons were almost shut down in a lot of ways.
00:43:22.660And the rainforest gradually over the centuries, you know, they shrank or they moved and things like that.
00:43:29.460So in theory, if things didn't happen too fast, maybe that could happen again.
00:43:34.220But the problem is, in this Anthropocene epoch, there's nowhere to go.
00:43:55.720Besides climate, we can cut the trees and move things around and pollute things.
00:44:00.120And so, really, it's the big picture of who we are, how do we run our civilization,
00:44:06.420and how do we see our place on the Earth that's going to determine this as much as the climate alone.
00:44:11.720Onward from vast uncharted space, forward through timeless void.
00:44:21.480Into us all there's search and race, the measureless might of the wind.
00:44:30.120In the steep, steep silence of thin blue air, I hold a lonely ledge.
00:44:39.460Where the air is clear and clean and rare, I give to the wind my pledge.
00:44:49.220By the strength of my arm, by the side of my eye, by the side of my face.
00:44:54.340Like you were saying earlier, climate change will bring some surpluses with the shortages,
00:45:00.320such as extraglacial melt water for farms until the glaciers are gone one day.
00:45:05.640And it'll be tempting to accordingly scale up agriculture and keep feeding a population boom.
00:45:11.480But you caution multiple times against short-sightedness and call for building reservoirs and canals.
00:45:19.220We recently spoke with Mark Shepard, who spoke about the strategy of key line design to slow the water down, to contain and soak in as much water as possible, which is being used to restore desertifying landscapes far and wide.
00:45:35.000But what are some of the other short term bonanzas that climate change may bring when ice free Arctic comes to mind, for example?
00:45:43.120And how can these new conditions factor in a long term sustainability plan?
00:51:39.480This is the clathrate gun, and we could fire it off by warming it, warming the world, thawing this methane ice, and letting it into the air.
00:51:50.180and it's a giant greenhouse gas, and it'll just kind of get away from us
00:51:54.140and sort of, you say, blow up the climate or something.
00:51:57.420But the question now is, how likely is that to go off like a climate gun all at once?
00:52:05.920And that's an area of active investigation now.
00:52:09.980The question is, where is all of this ice and how well insulated is it?
00:52:15.560And if it's under hundreds of feet of mud or hundreds of feet of teat,
00:55:58.340clarity of vision and solidity and reliability of information
00:56:02.500are just so critical, not just for our well-being,
00:56:06.300but even for the survival of an entire species.
00:56:08.520So I think it's really time to acknowledge that just learning how to learn, learning how to communicate with other folks, think for yourself, and judge good arguments and good information carefully is every bit as important now in this Anthropocene age as being the person who invents the new technology