(00:00:00) I'd like to say that I have been going through the Carlton catalog and I've been quite interested in what goes on here and I'm just wondering how you do it more than 850 courses offered and if you count English some 200 in language. But no Italian. How's that happen? And no geography. How can you train Renaissance people? If you don't have geography offered here my I'm prejudiced about that my my daughter, who is it who is educated as his her mother in our family is a had got her doctors in geography at Berkeley and she's teaching it at Austin who would geography I suggest geography and I suggest also that there should be some sort of cross-disciplinary courses and restoration, but I'll get around to that later if there's any later by the time I finished I've divided my time here very roughly and you'll see how roughly it is before I'm through that. I'd like to go on with a few more introductory remarks not very many. Just quoting people to show you that I've read something then I'll give a list of things that are not doing very well which means defining a list an inventory of opportunities for improvement. Then I'll ask in the whole section on the way out of our dilemma a couple of major questions one of them about. Well, I'll tell you what they are when I get there. And finally I'll come to us during climax, but the before that I'd like to so that there be some questions I picked up something at a restoration conference in Berkeley in January that seemed to be a good idea that they had a period that was they called the town whole section. They had to floor microphones and ask people to come up and make statements limited say to three minutes. Well, I said three minutes. Well, we have no for microphones, but it occurs to me that that's a good idea. And so I thought before I finished I would break for questions because you'd be by that time quite tired of the monotony my voice and you might like instead of asking a question or pretending that a statement was a question. You can just make a statement. That's an it gets many voices and I've seen that work very well where people will come in with It's or if they'll forget and just ask a question and then the responses from the audience and that really livens things up. So prepare yourself. Just think of a question to which I can open up to Old say Well for 10 minutes before the five minutes during climax, well some quotations one that that I like very well besides the one that restraining gave me to give me. The opportunity was one from Henry David Thoreau. What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on I like that one and I like one from dick Barnett from The Institute. I like to from dick Barnett The Institute of policy studies in Washington says we March toward Annihilation under the banner of realism. Save that for people who think that you're too not realistic and another that I like very well of his. Is it we do not increase our security by decreasing the security of our opponent? And I'll be saying that when I get to Lake Baikal and we should be saying it here quite often. Then I like still another one. It's from Lester Brown. He wrote the book building a sustainable society. And that's what we all need to be doing. And in the cover of that book on a jacket as a quotation, which I like very much. It says we do not inherit the Earth from our fathers we have borrowed. We are borrowing it from our children. At his book signing party. I was there and he asked me if I knew who wrote that and it's not given any attribution on the jack and I said, no I don't and he said well in the National Aquarium in Baltimore, it's carved in stone. And your name is underneath it. Well, that was a surprise. I didn't know I was that conservative because I've been thinking all along that we have not been borrowing from our children. We've been stealing from them because we have very little chance of paying back what we've taken away from the environment away from their future. There's no chance to put that back. We've been stealing and stealing from children should be considered illegal and I think it is One more quotation Lauren Isley. I learned to read Lauren Isley rather late, but I think he was one of our great writers. And he said the need is not really for more brains than it is for a gentler more tolerant people than one for us against the ice the tiger and the Bear. Said the hand that held the axe out of some blind old allegiance to the past now fondles. The machine gun is lovingly. It's a habit man will have to break. But the roots go very deep. So I guess one of my questions here's what are we doing about getting those roots out and getting something else going? So I'll start my speech that's all introductory. But Alex still quote one more. Something I used to end speeches with the quotation from Adlai Stevenson, which many of you probably know most of but it's worth repeating and worth memorizing. If it's his last speech in Geneva 1965, July when he was our ambassador to the United Nations, he fell dead shortly thereafter in a London Street that left us these words. We travel together passengers on a little spaceship dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil all committed for our safety to its security and peace. Preserved from Annihilation only by the care the work and I will say the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it have comfortable half miserable half confident half despairing half slaves of the ancient enemies of mankind and half-free in the liberation of resources on dreamed of until this day. No craft no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. their resolution depends the survival of us all that I think is a superb statement. It should be translated into all the languages that are offered here and others beside. It should be I think about a hundred feet high and carved in stone at the UN Plaza New York. I think it should be 15 feet high in the Oval Office and the occupants would be required to memorize it and understand it. Now this is something we have not done that was 18 1965 23 plus years ago if we had heated that. This would be a different world today. And as we watch the populations grow and watch the tensions grow, I'll get into that in a moment. We see the problems we've got well I use starting the speech formula and I have a standard device that John McPhee calls my sermon and has two parts now do it very quickly. I can stretch it out for an hour and a half if necessary, but I won't do that to you but first comes from jacques-yves Cousteau once with no training needed all just held his hand up and said that the Earth was the size of an egg. All the water on the Earth would be but one drop on that egg shell. You look at the globe 70% blue, you know is wrong. He do the arithmetic you find he's right the drop would be about a sixth of an inch in diameter. So I thought I'd see what I could do with the other two principal Resources with a little arithmetic and it'll help the atmosphere liquefied for comparison and which we dump so much stuff would be but a droplet on at eggshell the droplet would be about 1/32 of an inch in diameter. The soil is supposed to know a great deal about that in Minnesota, California to I spec barely visible to the naked eye. Drop droplet and spec make this planet different from anything else. We know in the universe and we hasten to get rid of the (00:08:24) difference. I think that's a mistake. (00:08:28) The other is how fast are we doing it and how johnny-come-lately are we and that that is more fun than anything where you take the age of the Earth four and a half billion years and for instant replay you squeeze it into the six days of creation. And this is compressed scale then Sunday night midnight creation begins. there's no life at all till Tuesday noon, and then life comes aboard the planet and this bill is telling you these comes more and more diverse more beautiful more stable more Diversified I said that We've had Millions upon millions of species the estimate now that the species and plants and animals on Earth varies from 5 million to 50 million. It's hard to tell we've identified fewer than half of what the lower number and all the rest of the numbers just come from extrapolation the rate of a discovery. I was acting Bill about what he's interested in pollen studies. Reading the history of the Earth at least 10,000 years back or more from studying apollomon in Lake beds two chords all these new opportunities to learn more and more and more are still ahead of us in any event back to my scale of things by Saturday morning and he's six days. There's been enough chlorophyll on Earth that the fossil fuels could really begin to form at 4:00 in the afternoon. The great reptiles came on stage at 9:00. There are finished at 10 the great whales went back to see the seals at 11 Nothing Like Us till about three minutes before midnight on Saturday. One and a half seconds before midnight. We were sterile hunter-gatherers, probably 25 million of us on the entire planet getting by on about a 25 hour a week of hunting and Gathering. And then we got this insistence upon being busy and invented agriculture one and a half seconds before midnight with this we could begin to simplify the diversity on earth when we move things out of the way so that we could grow the things we could (00:10:32) eat (00:10:35) the next half second. We've been so successful that for example, the forests that had rained the Mediterranean Sea were reduced to pitiful fragments like The Cedars of Lebanon if any of them are now left, A third of a second before midnight Buddha a quarter of a second Christ at 40 of the second the Industrial Revolution. When 200 the second our admiration of what we now could do with all the energy and all the steel in the metals. We'd found that the Industrial Revolution we could now accelerate our attack on a renewable and the non-renewable resources on Earth. It is now midnight Sunday's coming up. The day of rest had a restoration a day of what what are we going to do next right now in almost I guess in every country in every University. In every Fortune 500 Corporation the idea prevails that but we got away with for the last two hundredths of a second is par for the course and the way to succeed now is to speed it up. I think that's insane. But nobody else does so it's not called Insanity. The marble motto here though, I think is that we got to put ourselves in perspective. We've got to try to get a little bit of humility. Check Into Cash in our arrogance and pick up some humility instead, which reminds me of Ted Turner remember when he was trying to buy CBS. He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying if I had little humility, I'd be perfect. I happen to share a platform with him two years ago in Colorado. I was going to speak before he didn't I wanted to allude to that. So I just don't know what exactly did you say in that Wall Street Journal quote. He said if I had little humility I'd be perfect and since then I found a little humility. So the what I'm trying to lead up there as if he got to question growth the growth in our own numbers realizing that the Earth was already full and if you want more of us, we got to push something away. We have to extinguish something and our present rate of our industrial and human Advanced Society. We are getting rid of species at an enormous rate and the report to Jimmy Carter that he had called the 2000 year report any young but we're going to have my mm if he keep doing what we're doing every reported the end of his administration by the year 2000 somewhere between 500,000 and two million species of plants and animals. Then on Earth will have been akan have gone extinct not by any natural process that at our hand. And it seems to me that anybody who thinks that's acceptable has a strange sense of ethics and of equity. So that's one of the things I'd worry about. Let's get back to real time at business of the exponential attack the addiction to growth that started in all earnestness at the close of World War Two not that long ago. The Soviet Union has a story goes started the GNP raced the United States wanted no country to have a grocer national product than ours joined the race, which as everybody knows Japan has one. So what else can we do? I'll end this part of the statement of the speech by simply saying There are two questions right now that we have to ask ourselves. What kinds of growth must we have? What kinds can we no longer afford and I would say Detroit should worry if we answer that question properly. I have in the back of my speech here. That's my speech. This is the part of my boarding pass envelope and I see here Citgo gas the performer the high-octane detergent gasoline. You need to get the most out of your car. What we need is to get most of us out of cars and well I'm moving into the next part there is a list of things the the opportunities that we have is pretty much epitomized in the things that are going wrong and everybody except the two presidential candidates now seems to know that lots of things are going wrong with the environment. I haven't heard any of them mentioned the greenhouse effect. That's a pretty serious one. I've hardly I don't think I've heard the mention the ozone barrier. It mentioned acid rain. None of them has mentioned the loss of species diversity upon which we all depend. Now just put in parentheses here sir, a story. I picked up a month and a half ago from Jay Hair who heads the National Wildlife Federation. He was talking to the choices for the future conference at Aspen. He talked about his daughter who at the age of three had some disease they couldn't diagnose. They tried everything and finally the time they came to the time when the doctor said She has four days to live. She was three. She's now in college. What saved her came from the rosy periwinkle? A bit of chemical miracle in a species that lived only in Madagascar and is now extinct. How much more of that is there waiting for us? What are we doing? What are we eradicated without a second thought that is going to be so terribly (00:16:25) important. (00:16:29) Remember going through your prospectus courses offered. I saw that they're quite a few offered in economics. I wonder if any of their in Economist here are there before I say this are there any suggestions are the two missing factors in economic thinking? The cost to the earth and the cost of the future from what I've seen the cost of the earth is not he's usually ignored because it's a freebie it just there like the are you use it the cost of the future is discounted. Those are the two most important things if economics is going to be something besides what hazeled henders and describes it as a form of brain damage. (00:17:17) now (00:17:23) no economists have left the room yet, but I see them Rising. Alright, so I've listed a few of the things that are gone wrong. And why do we have the greenhouse effect acid rain the ozone barrier threat largely because of the rapidity with which were burning fossil fuels do we have to do it that fast, of course not we could get by with something like 1/4 of the energy We Now using this country per capita. Hardly, anyone is doing it the Rocky Mountain Institute. Amory Lovins is pushing that very hard listen to a little bit more and more and more but it's still ahead of us. The candidates don't know anything about this and not even thinking about it. But I look back over my 50 years plus or minus in the environmental movement. I see that most of the things that I treasured that we've lost our lost either through the Mad Dash for more energy or the stupid use of it when he got it. So energy is a terribly important and you get finally to our search for energy now and we get the the electric Forum saying well if we want to avoid Greenhouse, we've got to have more nuclear (00:18:27) power. (00:18:30) I was once for nuclear power particularly when two bombs kept me from the beaches in Japan when I was coming home from combat and Italy, so I was grateful for it until I understood that it was necessary and I learned about 12 years ago that we don't need it and why we don't need it. And all I need to do is to sum up this that the country that is now most deeply addicted to nuclear power is France. It is done very great damage to the French economy, which was the the biggest debtor Nation among the industrial Nations until under the Reagan Administration United States passed France and being the biggest debtor Nation Francis over committed to nuclear and one figure that I got it comes from Ted Taylor one of our top nuclear physicists said that if the reprocessing station for nuclear fuel at Le hog, France were destroyed on purpose or by accident. Western Europe would be uninhabitable. That's a pretty high price to pay for electricity. Don't let them sell you nuclear as a substitute to get rid of the greenhouse effect. Well we go on I could go on indefinitely but I don't really need to go on. I think there's finally an emergency re-emergence of concern around the world except among presidential candidates were what's happening to them the environment and we've got to do something about it. We have reached the end of our rope or whatever it is, whatever metaphor you like better. There's a big gap ahead and sign says bridge out and we're just rolling head. Nobody's even putting on the brakes. We've got to do something else. and I could be really very discouraging by going on and on and on about what we should be doing what's going wrong, but you probably have heard a lot of that. So I like to change the pace a little bit. But with two stories one is from Ian McCart. He wrote the book design with nature. And somewhere in the middle of the book. I saw it rather late, but somebody called my attention to it is a paragraph of a story. He tells his students goes like this that the final nuclear exchange is occurred. The Earth is covered with a thin gray Paul and all life has been extinguished save for a colony of algae. So deep in a crevice there spared from blast and radiation. They hold a meeting. They realize that three and a half billion years of evolution must be played out again, three and a half billion years of trial and error success and failure cooperation aggression and they come to a unanimous conclusion next time. No (00:21:06) brains. (00:21:11) Well, they've got them and we can do better the other story just for the transition is from Marjorie lovings. I guess it was 11 years ago. There is a first big acid rain conference in Toronto. Is that point after he'd been hearing all that went wrong? She said well if all the world's a stage this must be the Gong Show. So next comes the what are the ways out and here come two questions to start you thinking about what we can do and then we should shortly be ready for some questions from you, but not quite yet. But one of the questions and I like to ask this particular scientist is they seem to show signs of arrogance course. I have none at all, but they had a lot and I say well, what are you thoroughly convinced of right now? Did you think is most likely to be laughed at in 25 years? And that stops them. Because the scientists among you can think back 25 years ago and what we're saying, well that was rather naive or whatever it was and I think we've got to think about the consequences now of our our overconfidence and where we are at the moment. The story I like best there I guess is comes from a film Canadian film I saw once for there were talking about the James Bay project James Bay was a huge project for hydroelectricity to be shipped down to New York and environs and they dammed the area and raise put moved out. We're going to move a lot of people out of the area the impoundment area and that brought protests from the indigenous people. So here came an Indian down to Ottawa to a courthouse. I've been to the courtroom in the witness chair for the first time in his life. He was asked. Do you promise to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth? And his answer is I can't tell the truth. I can only say what I know. And it seems to me that that has a bit of message in it that has some humility in it. And we need quite a bit of that when you see that all we've learned and it's little bit of time. We've been on Earth. It's just been picking to get a cliche that has been the tip of the iceberg of the knowledge. There is do uncovered. We got to remember that and we have to be as well as scientists. We have to be prescient. and the definition is I like best of prescient is that Ability to anticipate consequences Never On Earth as any species. Kind of a predicament where it must more carefully than we do anticipate consequences of our Acts. Who accept Lewis Mumford ever anticipated the consequences of the automobile? Look what it is done dismembered City's giving us the greenhouse effect. It's convenient. What does it cost the future but is it cost the Earth? These are the questions again. And again, what does it cost the Earth? What does it cost the future? Sounds pretty serious, didn't I going to try to be funny but that's not very funny. What else can we do? Well, that was one question. What do you think is just pure gold right now. There's most likely to be laughed at but then then I've got some other one later, but I think what I'm come up with next is it is time for the great u-turn. There's a book by that title just out. I just read about it. I haven't got it yet. But it's by Teddy Goldsmith who edits the ecologist in England and he's a very bright guy and he had a lot of influence on his brother the world to be quite different. His brother is Sir James Goldsmith the Takeover artist who probably doesn't listen to Teddy much at all. But Teddy is a very good environmentalist and he's talking about the need for the U-turn for looking going a just reversing our course and seeing what we can do that we haven't been doing Filling the Gap the intellectual Gap now. We're almost no one under 45 is making any waves of what is being written among and being traded among the intellectuals. It's a big intellectual void a lot of people under 45 here. You got worked for you work cut out for you ahead of that. How do you cells there's that vacancy in culture. There's a need for as someone else has suggested in the new book a Manhattan project for peace something that kind of effort going into the peace effort. Bill alluded to the fate of the earth conferences. I got that idea when I was asked to give the Albright lecture at Berkeley and my subject then was conservation and Security National Security and I'd hardly finished writing The Collector because before I realized that you don't have National Security until there's Global Security and the United States have been working very hard toward that so we should out of that became the conclusion Steve Rao who was working with me and I decided that we needed a conference a national conference on this subject at the White House. Then we realized that if at the White House back, then they'd probably but James Warren in charge of it and that wouldn't do any good. So we did our own we held one in New York conference the first biennial conference on the fate of the earth conservation and security. In a sustainable Society was our title. We got a thousand people. We got to just a really first-class conference. So we thought it would hold another two years later and we held it in Washington but in Washington we did got about half the crowd because I guess Washington gets more conferences and they know what to do with we held the next one in Ottawa. The first one had 13 endorsing organizations the second hundred and twenty-five in Ottawa 297. And this is what we were looking for to get other organizations than just the environmental organizations concerned and the feasts organizations in Canada and Ottawa. We had 45 piece organizations, 45 environmental organizations and 90 from 297 means 207 from all over the lot. This is what we are looking for the new Coalition people who like the idea of survival not just survival. You can do that in jail, but Survival on a pleasant Earth. The planet is beautiful as ours is I was very encouraging and one of the questions that came to the organizers there and Ottawa was from Nicaragua. They asked if they could have the next one. Well, it sounded like a great idea to have a conference like this on the fate of the Earth in the third world. Nicaragua is a tough place that has the United States has been making it a little difficult for Nicaragua to do it. It would like to do for our reasons for their reasons whatever but they are very much interested in it. There's been a year delay, but next June we'll have it. I've been down there. Once last May I'm going down again assumes shortly after I get back from Lake Baikal going to Guatemala and and Costa Rica also to see what some of the exciting things are going on there. We're having an international meeting in Managua getting people from all over his bill mentioned to plan on a conference and part of the subject is going to be restoration environmental restoration. Is that maybe change the name tried to from fate of the earth to hope for the Earth thinking fate didn't sound that Pleasant and hope sounds a little bit better in any event, the nicaraguans the government and the non-governmental organizations are quite excited about it very much interested have no money. So one of the things we're trying to do is get money and get people down there and I hope some of you will get there and we'll try to keep some of you here informed about how we're progressing (00:29:02) on it. (00:29:05) But the restoration question is the one that I want to dwell on and not after all was a title of my talk new ways for restoration. It happens that Nicaragua is the only country on Earth that has the word restoration and its Constitution. So maybe we need some amendments elsewhere. But what can we do about restoration what has been done so that you don't have to do too much pioneering. What are the examples of what's been successful? I allude again to the conference in Berkeley last January John Berger who wrote the book restoring the Earth organized this conference on restoring the Earth and he expected two or three hundred people and we got more than a thousand Stewart Udall our former Secretary of the Interior in my mind. The best one we've had came to that conference. So it is happening and thought this is a milestone that the conservation movement was moving around at this was something new something positive. And that night the final night rather no Brown who heads the United Nations environment programme in New York made the final speech the banquet speech gave 10 awards from the United Nations to people who across this country had done some good work in restoration and titled his speech from lamentation to Restoration. It's healing time on Earth and I've been finding as I get around that there's more and more enthusiasm about this old. I idea to concentrate not on what's going wrong, but how to fix it. how to repair it how to regenerate how to heal how to restore There been some good examples at that conference. One of the most exciting there's a man David Wingate who has spent 20 years in a little island South of Bermuda called nonsuch Island, which had been devastated trying to restore his best he could but he thought had been there in the first place looking in various instances for a fossil evidence of what might have been there. He's done quite well and he's 20 years and I'm hoping you can get a book out on that Illustrated is Illustrated lecture brought the first Standing Ovation at that (00:31:14) conference. (00:31:16) Went on for an hour and a half, but just the detail the painstaking care what you want about that was inspiring. There are other examples that are equally inspiring but we need books on those are some better death description than we have in California and quite proud of what our former resources secretary. Did Huey Johnson working for our Governor Jerry Brown. Tom that California was deteriorating faster than it should at least in our opinion other than anybody else's and went to work at a time when our legislature was cutting very severely on other programs went to work on a program what he did. He called investing for Prosperity. This was a restoration program restoring forests oil Wetlands. He got a hundred twenty five million a year out of the legislature was cutting everything else and he says and I believe him that that is paid off already and he hasn't been an officer caught a while. We need more of that in Florida. There's a 50 million dollar project now going on on the Kissimmee River. Restoring it getting it out of the straitjacket the Corps of Engineers put it in letting it again. What are the wetlands along the way very much worthwhile. We can go on with lots of other examples. I think I have a few more here, but I won't go on to too many of them. Well, I'll just say that one. For example my allude to dr. Dan Jansen who was in Costa Rica restoring the dry forests. There was an article about this in a January 15th Science magazine and I urge anyone who still can find a copy to look at other tried up on a front. There are three words there that really captured my imagination. And worried me. He said that in going about the restoration of this Forest. He was confronted with these three words scattered biotic debris. It seems to me that that just about epitomizes what we're doing to the Earth with our industrial society and we've been doing for the last two and a half centuries. We've been scattering the biotic wealth getting rid of it. So it's scattered biotic to raise what we're left with and what he is left with and he's finding it terribly important to use whatever he can get these little bits wherever they are as in ocula to build back and they destroyed Countryside as nearly as he can. What was there once before I want to go down and visit that shortly and see what's going on has been quite a bit written about it. We need more but this is the challenge. How do you do it? How do you go about it? And the challenges are real one. What do we have? Going on in our universities. What do you have in Carleton College that would help people understand what's needed. If suddenly she's we should decide then instead of investing the trillions of Dollars around the world were investing in in our moment to destroy things. We invest it in a whole effort to put things back into working order. To make the life-support system capable once again of supporting life not just ours, but that beautiful variety of it that preceded the Industrial Revolution. What kinds of courses are there? I noticed in the Environmental Studies its suggested while you go to within an existing traditional Department. And special specialized on the environmental aspects of that. Well, I'd say the you might write the same thing here at Carleton College for a restoration restoration studies. Whatever your department. You don't have law here, but schools that do should figure out what kind of litter legislation is necessary for a restoration. If you're an economics and banking what kind of funding can be determined and they're all sorts of ways to do it because it is an investment in the future. It's going to cost something but not nearly so much as failing to do it. This is a challenge. What do you do in any Department? Not just how do you restore the Prairie or a forest or a wetland? But how do you restore excellence? And the American society and the global Society. How do you get back? What we've been losing so fast. Our Healthcare is slipping. Our education is slipping you name it. It's slipping how to restore transportation again. That isn't so dependent upon what is destroying the very air in his breathe these opportunities to restore to build back. I can think of no more exciting Challenge and I would like to see Carleton College do something about it. I had dinner at the farm house last night. I went had chocolate chip cookies last night at The Farmhouse and had just before that dinner at the cafeteria and I urge the people I saw they're all that's you students get going and the faculty see what you can get started here at Carleton College on restoration studies or whatever. You want to call it. I'd love to see something like that happen. I think it would be pretty challenging to (00:36:31) all of you. (00:36:35) And one of the things here in the last thing on my list is conversion. Economic conversion. Can we afford piece? I think we can I think you in Minnesota. Can I'm not sure that Massachusetts, Connecticut or California King? Right now for example in California Agriculture is one of our big products we provide and we just brag about it in California 1/4 of the food America eats. That's a 15 14 to 15 billion dollar a year business. Our defense business is 50 billion dollars eight billion and San Diego alone San Diego can't afford piece, California can't afford piece. How do we convert? How do we get all the talent? We have now making weapons of Destruction concentrating on the real security we can get from trying to build back the life support system together. As I suggested him Colorado Aspen, what we need is a u.s. USSR Marshall Plan of sorts to rebuild the life support system on Earth to concentrate on that and since neither the US and the USSR have any money anymore we could get Japan to finance it. Well, the last question I like to ask this no matter who I'm with. What are you going to do when you grow up? It's good question. I haven't answered it myself yet and I'm 76 and I shouldn't wait too much longer to decide but what are you going to do? What are you going to do with this extraordinary capability you have You'll hear from any speakers and you'll hear it for me. There isn't anybody here and it's audience not a soul who can't make a difference in the way the world works. Not anybody. And you can give examples I can give examples of individuals who have done that. Rachel Carson she landed her English. She did her homework. She cared Amory Lovins is changing the world's thinking about energy Ralph Nader has shaken people that Paul Ehrlich. Just thinking about individuals. individuals here can and need to What Good's a college education? If you don't have a living planet to practice on that you've (00:38:53) learned. So this is the question. How (00:38:59) about you? What are you going to do? You've been training for a long time for this and I'm getting close to the end, but I haven't quite ended yet. So I'm going to put off the stirring finish is going to be mostly about you while we wait for a while and see who has a question or two to raise. Is anybody with a question or a statement? I remember I warned you. Does anyone and Carleton College have a statement rare yes or no question. Can you do you want to stand up and (00:39:31) boom out? (00:39:46) Yes, this is a question about energy and nuclear power. We said we don't need it. How about the alternatives to supply that amount right now? I think nuclear power in the United States supplies about four percent of our energy more than that of our electricity, of course, but four percent of our energy At an enormous cost now the best answer to this question will come from the Rocky Mountain Institute from Amory Lovins. He's talking about investing. Megabucks in Nega Watts that is the whole effort of investing in energy conservation and efficiency and his figures are absolutely startling. He gives many examples. He starts for example with our refrigerators. They use five times the amount of energy they need to because of their grossly inefficient design and if we don't learn how to design the right guess who will Japanese so why don't we sharpen up? It goes on for from lighting to efficient lighting again lighting is terribly wasteful of energy. And architecture has been Tarik enormously wasteful that is that in some of the most important savings and be done and building right using some of the things we learned since the Roman days and I knew more than we do now and how to save energy but again in the end go through the whole list of things and Amory is pointed out that since the oil crisis of the early 70s. We are produced 100 times more energy by making available what we have otherwise been wasting that has come from all the new energy generation efforts made new so it's a staggering figure. That if utilities and he's got quite a few now that are investing in his advice if utilities would invest. In funding energy-saving devices in homes and our market area that we have far better investment Borden and building new power stations. And of course particularly in building new nuclear power stations where we have all the way along the nuclear fuel cycle these terrible problems the waist. We have to store indefinitely practically and have yet to discover for all the promises how to do it. And if we find a place to put it we still have to transport it from where the problem is created to where we presumably can end it. And the transportation problem itself is a very major Hazard. So it's worth it making the major effort and energy conservation and Energy Efficiency. They almost overlap. Thank you for that question. (00:42:22) Yes. (00:42:30) How do I feel about monkey-wrenching and this is a question I get quite often if what if I think of the Earth First trees and my contemporaries in the my peers or whoever are my superiors in the environmental business love to dump on Earth first, but I love to lat I have quite often introduced David Forman who started his first along with mikrosil and I share the platform with new many times. I always insist on introducing him and I go along with about this little litany that rust training set of Brower the Sierra Club. Thank God for because they make us appear reasonable in the conservation Foundation. Then I founded Friends of the earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable and a foreman founded Earth First to make friends the earth look reasonable to say what we need now is an organizational make David Forman look reasonable and usually think people just even in law school people just cheer for that. They think that's a good idea because what has the Earth firsters the at Abby's the monkey wrenchers done. They have got some notice that we were not getting in the conventional ways. They got press they got public attention. They gave the more conventional stayed conservative dead in the water organizations some CPR. They gave them more room to operate they did they helped in that way and I think they gave a warning that if attention isn't paid to what they're complaining about worst can happen really much worse. That is great damage to things and great harm to people we shouldn't cause that kind of terrorism we should listen. The Earth's first effort has been driven by frustration lack of Hope they've tried the usual processes. They've lost it in hearings. They lost in court because they the case is pretty much fixed ahead of time but the damage goes on so they're trying to wake people up. So I advise simply that please if you're going to have demonstrations make them funny make them presumably entertaining to the public. So the message comes through and it's an entertaining message. Not one that aggravates. And then eyesight I figured that you don't need any more than and Alderman's book. He said that if it had not been for demonstrations Nixon would have used the bomb and the Vietnam War. I don't think you need any more than that, unless you remember Henry David Thoreau who was in jail and when Ralph Waldo Emerson asked him why he was in jail for his protest. He asked Ralph. Why are you out there? So it's it takes something else until we improve our access to Media to we get attention. We have to use attention-getting devices. So I hope they'll be funny. I hope to be good and I hope their lead to some reform and I'm grateful for the operating room these people give me and my conservative (00:45:23) organizations. (00:45:25) That was two questions one more way way back (00:45:28) fine. (00:45:42) Well, I don't know that I supposedly there's a method to do is to turn the question around. Well, how would you do it? But I'd be cheating. I try I guess to keep talking keep getting books out keep publishing whatever it is to get the public attention and I like a quotation I got from her young friend of mine George Dyson, who was my son Ken were the two principles and all he can wrote the book the Starship in a canoe, but Freeman Dyson the physicist and George Dyson the canoeist. And George the seeking to find Freedom without taking it from someone else. And I think if we want to find security we have to find security without taking it from someone else if we take it from someone else. We don't have it because that person he took it from is going to come after us to get it. Unfortunately, we're taking a lot of our security or buying it by spending our children's security which was back to my own original quotation. We're getting security by using the things readily available us and leaving behind an earth. That was almost unmanageable. That's unmanageable almost now. So we create things that nature cannot handle. I think we still need nature as the example and we better save every bit of it be possibly can it is going to tell us what we need to know. Look outside anywhere natural processes are going on and you'll find that nothing is wasted everything is recycled. We know very little about these chemical reactions for all our science. We don't know much they don't know. How chlorophyll does it. We don't know how the end products work. We don't know how nature makes cement which we have to make it about 1,800 degrees. Make stronger cement in a chicken's egg. Then we make at a hundred and three degrees stronger still at 50 50 degrees or less and seashells. These are all wonderful bits of Technologies are out there that work that are biodegradable. And we've escaped that we've invented things nature can't handle and for our security for our convenience. I think is more for our convenience in our security because I asked the question again, and again it just a polarizing question. The United States has spent two trillion dollars on the arms race and the last eight years. Does anyone in this audience? Feel more secure as a result. Did I see a hand one? One hand that's about the ratio are fewer. We're not more secure. We didn't get security got something else we got. Not security. Anyhow, it's time to wind it up. I was talking about you and what you can do and your training period And I like to remind people in an audience that a small part of everyone in the audience. Very small part is three and a half billion years old. In fact, we are all contemporaries. We are all the same age except some of his show it a little more than the (00:48:42) others. (00:48:45) From the beginning of life on Earth bill was saying lots of things have come along lots of species that's fell by the wayside. But we are here as a species that didn't fall by the wayside three and a half billion years generation after generation after generation Millennia after (00:49:01) millennia. (00:49:05) The whole Miracle at the passing on of Life continued the magic of it. Whatever you'd say. It's an extraordinary thing the complexity that has been passed on and just get you to analyze that you've got the so you've got two ears and you're listening to a speech. It's now getting too long. But you're going to do this during finished Oak have heart. You here in Stereo. That's a pretty tricky convention. If you ever looked at the diagram of human, are you wonder how it has ever designed and then two years to get the different and to measure the difference and give you depth and sound to eyes a hundred and twenty million rods in each retina all put in right side up. They don't do that in reactors all the time. It just very neat job rods and cones that enable you to perceive color not only in one eye but on the other I separated. So you get this these two views and you're constantly Computing these two different views in your brain and you're putting the world in 3D. And I used to go on from there to what you do with your food and you had breakfast and you'll soon have lunch you hope. And you'll digest that food and it'll go through all the chemical analyses you done to think about and your trillions of cells will all be equitably fed that that sells getting more than they should of course, but it's all this goes on. I used to stop it there then on an airplane the other day I started thinking about my lunch. There wasn't anything else to do with bad you I counted the number of times. They had to chew for my Airline lunch. It was 2000. So I extrapolated from that and I said well for every day then I got two to five thousand times for breakfast lunch and dinner rough figure and I realized something something remarkable that every for every bite (00:50:56) Your (00:50:56) teeth being the hardest substance. You have the soft acceptance. You've got your tongue has got to put food on both sides before you bite and then get the hell out of the way before your teeth close. It's miraculous and very rarely. Do you miss that? So I just say let's hear it for the tongue which has which has to go through 32 different shapes just to go through the alphabet. Try it sometime when you're dull and you're bored by everything else like Donna speech any I then remembered that this all pass through this very narrow Gateway a little bit of DNA a very small amount was all that was needed to start this whole mechanism that became you. And to continue that mechanism that minimum amount that little bit from the female the little bits of mail and I'm not going to talk birds and bees but that's a very small amount that wrapped up all this knowledge. You've got except that you've added with your conscious knowledge and you learn from the environment and a few things and from books and from Carleton College, but here the hundred billion people more or less who ever lived came here through a that's a minimum Gateway and if you put those two minimum, it's of DNA necessary for all that information for under billion people. (00:52:14) That would fit (00:52:15) in a sphere a six of them engine diameter. Got that figure from Stanford. I believe it. This is an amazing thing talk about miniaturization. How did they do it? I don't know but I don't need to know because it done it's a it handled and every time I see a new child come along and it's a grandparent. I'm very much very observant the new children watch how fast they learn all this. It's amazing. I love it. Where was this knowledge built in Civilization? No. In wildness Thoreau said in wildness is the preservation of the world and he had the right idea and he was talking about this and I begin to understand it. What we have what other living things you can also everything outside that's alive is it old as we are three and a half billion years a little piece of it you have tomorrow that that and remember that we and that were built in wildness in Wilderness. If you will, there wasn't anything else until the last few thousand years. That was all. But we were talking about Ian mcharg was talking about the trial and error success and failure symbiosis aggression and Wilderness that build his wildness is the utter encyclopedia the utmost encyclopedia. And we dare not scattered anymore. Just until it just scattered biotic debris. We can do much better. We must do much better. So help us. We will do much better by simply carrying and making a commitment and I like a quotation from an old friend of mine. I met him only once but I read his book the Scottish him on an expedition because I love Mountaineering And in the beginning of that book he was talking while we go on this Expedition on that was about 45 years ago. And they finally made a passage that made the commitment. They made the payment on The Passage to India sounds like a TV title, but in any event. once he'd made that commitment once they'd made the commitment then he wrote just in the bottom of page 6 he started some lines there that I should memorize but I I won't give them all to you, but in effect he said. Until one commits oneself. There was always hesitation drawing back failure to succeed. Then he went on the but the moment one commits oneself and all sorts of things happen Providence access to all sorts of things happen, that would never otherwise have happened all events begin to fall in place. Well, this happens to be my religion. It just happened in my own lifetime if I made a commitment I learned more about that subject than I needed to know almost it just all fell in place and he ended up (00:54:57) He (00:54:57) liked very much this couple of from Goethe whatever you can do or dream. You can begin it boldness has genius power and (00:55:06) magic in it. (00:55:09) And that genius and that power and that magic and that dream and that boldness are all necessary but have to happen next and I end with a quotation from my favorite comic strip published only in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's Farley by Phil Frank Farley has a guru and old bearded guy who lives in the cave at knows everything is sincere. and he (00:55:31) said and (00:55:32) he's called bother Reebok. So far Lee said Baba. I'm in trouble Bob as I speak to me Sam Carly. I've got to write this piece on drugs and what they're doing to the country in the Youth of our country, and I don't know quite what to do. What should I say which I advocate? And Baba says they're just one answer. improve reality That's what we need to do and that boldness meant dream and the magic and everything else. I would need to do to improve reality. The reality we've inherited isn't going to do it. So that's the end of it. So as you go home improve reality and get some sort of curriculum going at Carleton and restoration. Thank (00:56:19) you.