There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism -- or at least, the prospect of a new equilibrium, if we can manage to ameliorate our most destructive impulses. Wildlife conservationist Joe Walston argues that -- seemingly paradoxically, but not really -- increasing urbanization provides hope for biodiversity preservation and poverty alleviation moving forward. As one piece of evidence, while our population is still growing, the rate of growth has slowed substantially as people move into cities and new opportunities become available. We discuss these trends, the causes underlying them, and what strategies suggest themselves to bring humans into balance with the environment before it's too late.
Joe Walston is Senior Vice President for Field Conservation the Wildlife Conservation Society. He received his Masters degree in Zoology and Animal Biology from Aberdeen University. Before moving to New York, he spent fifteen years working in on conservation programs in Africa and SouthEast Asia. His work in Cambodia was awarded with that country's highest civilian honor. A species of tube-nosed bat has been named Murina Walston in recognition of his work on protecting bat habitats.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. If you remember back in the early go-go youthful days of Mindscape, we had Geoffrey West on in episode five. Geoffrey's an expert on complex systems and scaling from physical systems to biology to social systems. And one of the things we talked about was cities and how the fact that human beings congregate in cities is extraordinarily helpful when it comes to generating ideas, innovation, progress. The number of patents per person is much higher in a city than in rural areas, for example, not just because there are more people, but even more per person.
0:00:42 SC: Today we're gonna talk about cities or urbanization more generally as engines of actually protecting and preserving the environment. So the idea is not only that is moving into cities good for human beings, we talk to each other, we experience diverse possible outcomes and we have good ideas, but it's even better for the planet to have human beings in cities. This can seem paradoxical, but I think that we'll try to show you that it's not and I should say also, we're not trying to have an agenda that cities are the best. I happen to live in a big city, but I appreciate all the listeners, no matter where they are, farms, house boats, mountain tops, you can listen to Mindscape from anywhere you want.
0:01:23 SC: Today, we're gonna talk about ecology nature conservation with Joe Walston. Joe is a conservationist and naturalist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he is the vice president for Field Conservation Programs. And Joe spent numerous years working on Conservation of Nature in Africa and Asia and other spots around the world, so he's not exactly an anti-nature city boy, but he's done the science, he's looked at how human growth has been affecting our planet, obviously it's not all good. Climate change, pollution are very, very real. But urbanization, Joe claims, the fact that people are being concentrated in cities, gives us a new way to live in harmony with nature, really. If you're worried about population growth, for example, the population of the Earth is still growing, but the rate of population growth is dramatically slowing. It peaked in the 1960s and much of that is because people have moved into cities and are having fewer children there. We might be undergoing a phase transition from an exponential growth phase where we're just having more and more people to a new phase where there's a certain fraction of the earth taken up by human settlements but it's mostly urban and nature, and all the different species on earth can survive in harmony with us at the same time.
0:02:42 SC: That's what we're gonna get into. We're gonna talk about all those issues. It may or may not be true, but it's certainly food for thought. As a reminder, you can support Mindscape by pledging on Patreon at patreon.com/seanmcarroll and I very much appreciate everyone's support. Thank you for all those who have pledged and with that, let's go.
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0:03:19 SC: Joe Walston, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03:21 Joe Walston: Thanks very much.
0:03:22 SC: Now, I thought we would begin because population is something where people talked about it, right? Resources, environmentalism, urbanism, all these things, when you talk about, people have pre-existing ideas in their head. It's not like talking about the Higgs boson where you can just say anything. So before we go back and lay the ground work, why don't you give away the punch line? What is the sort of elevator pitch for your proposing a fairly new way of thinking about some of these issues?
0:03:47 JW: So the punch line would be that for the whole entire life of ourselves and the actual international environmental movement, the Earth has been on a steady decline in terms of nature. Nature has been on a decline. And all of conservation has been designed around merely slowing declines and we really haven't seen any sort of indication of anything but that continuation. But just as we are really getting towards the real crux on the future of nature and the last decisions on whether we'll have much of nature left, we're starting actually to see the ground work for establishing the foundations for a real recovery of nature. And that is now within our grasp and within certainly the lifetime of ourselves or possibly our children, and yet it is quite possible for us to ignore it and therefore miss that opportunity.
0:04:39 SC: But overall, an optimistic message, you would say?
0:04:42 JW: Overall an optimistic message, not a inevitable message.
0:04:45 SC: Right, okay. So there's a ring that we can grasp for, and maybe get it.
0:04:50 JW: Absolutely.
0:04:51 SC: Alright, so great, this is something that we should all be hearing about, I think. Why don't you tell us your background, what your job is right now?
0:05:00 JW: Sure, I'm the Senior Vice President for our global programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society. So WCS was the old New York Zoological Society, which was involved in much of the early conservation work in North America and then some of the founders of the international conservation movement early on. It has two arms, runs the five zoos and aquarium in New York, including the Bronx Zoo and Central Park Zoo and New York Aquarium, but also has this international conservation arm. And it's that side that I work for and I run their global programs.
0:05:36 SC: And does this come out of an academic background, get a PhD and things like that? Did you just become a...
0:05:42 JW: No. I was always told at school you could never do wildlife or animals as a job. And that was beaten out of me very early on, and I ended up doing... Interested in mathematics early on, and then actually went back into a further degree in zoology. And only after I discovered other people doing zoology.
0:06:00 SC: But you always loved the animals. That was an early goal.
0:06:03 JW: Yeah, it was a very simple one. I've always loved animals and never managed to shake it.
0:06:06 SC: Do you think that the mathematics has been of any help? We tell ourselves, in physics certainly, that the rigorous training that we give our students is useful no matter what you end up doing.
0:06:17 JW: I've always found it interesting. It's easy to overstate how much it actually does truly help me in this. But occasionally, it's useful to say so.
0:06:24 SC: Big fan of overstating things in that way.
0:06:26 SC: All right. So then let's set the stage for our audience's minds about the conventional story. Before we get to your story, there is... Maybe it's an exaggeration, but when I think of population and things like that, I think that either people ignore it, or they basically have a doom-selling to do, right? Like that the population is exploding, this is really bad, that's gonna overcome the entire Earth. So why would we have ever been concerned, or why should we be concerned? What is the conventional worry?
0:07:00 JW: The real worry around population links off to the consumption. That obviously with increased numbers of people, comes an increased level of consumption. And we live on a planet with limited resources.
0:07:13 SC: So consuming food and metals.
0:07:15 JW: Essentially, it's nature. The conversion...
0:07:16 SC: Yeah, consuming nature.
0:07:17 JW: Of natural capital to other forms of capital. That really is a consumption of nature. And so whilst we all can argue about different levels of consumption and how it flows, or rich and poor and inequality, essentially the more people... Unless you have any sort of insight to population growth, it's very difficult to be able to think about conservation and sustainable management of natural resources.
0:07:41 SC: I think there's probably some rough intuitive feeling that the earth is finite and there's a bunch of people who can't go on forever, right?
0:07:48 JW: Yeah, that's exactly it, and we all know that. And we've theorized in the past about where those limits are. We've on the whole got them wrong at different points. But that doesn't mean the final endpoint, which is we do live on a finite planet and we... And until we find some sort of stabilization of that population, it's gonna be hard to be able to find strategies of sustainability.
0:08:13 SC: And this little controversy that we have been affecting the planet enormously, right? There's this word anthropocene. Can you explain that to us?
0:08:23 JW: Yeah. Anthropocene is the word, which I think has merit and holds up as a description of a planet, which is defined no longer necessarily by purely geological or even climate features, but actually is singly defined by the population of humans and their impact on the earth.
0:08:46 JW: We human beings... How much... What was the human population 100,000 years ago or something like that?
0:08:53 SC: You're gonna put me on the spot for exact numbers in 100,000 years... But I mean we...
0:08:55 SC: Yeah, well, very, very rough. Order of magnitude.
0:08:58 JW: Yeah. We have grown from... For millennia, we have spread across the world. That's the first thing, the geographical scope is quite enormous. And we often forget actually how successful we have been for so long at distributing ourselves right across the planet. But almost invariably across the planet, up until incredibly recently, we have always lived in relative population stability. Of course, I mean, the centers of that. And there are many reasons for that, not least of course that we've had massively high death rates, which have always...
0:09:36 JW: And we'll get into more about it later on.
0:09:36 SC: And keep things in control, yeah.
0:09:37 JW: And keep things under control. And so actually for me, the distribution across all habitats and parts of the world has been a more impressive movement of people than has the actual population increase. But essentially, the world has started to go through what's called the demographic transition and I don't know if now is here the place to start describing that transition.
0:10:00 SC: So that's the... Yeah, go ahead and describe it.
0:10:02 JW: Sure, very basically... There are, depending on who you are, three or five stages. But let's break it down to three stages of demographic transition. The first one is where really mortality rates and birth rates have kind of kept tally with each other. And on the whole, that people have lots of kids and sadly, lots of kids die. And that's been the feature of many of our societies for enormous parts of human history.
0:10:28 JW: The second phase of demographic transition is whereby the... We have managed to do some very important, very basic things. We've managed to control some very prevalent diseases, we've been able to give fresh water and livable conditions. We've been able to get hold of many of the drivers and control many of the drivers of that mortality rate. But of course, for that phase, then you have continued fertility rates. You have people who traditionally still have 10, 12 children, and therefore, you have this dramatic separation between those two levels. The mortality rate goes down, the fertility rate stays the same, and therefore populations start to go through the roof. And then of course, the third phase, which is that those same communities, those same societies then respond, and the natural fertility rate comes down. Often people, therefore, start to choose to invest more in fewer children.
0:11:23 SC: So when you say choose, this is a conscious decision? Or is it just different conditions? "No, I don't need quite as many kids."
0:11:30 JW: Well, that's something that could be a conscious decision, so that's in the conditions change and there are many other factors involved, including women's ability to influence those factors, which is a major influence on that. But on the whole, the motivations and the incentives change. And so whether you're in whatever part of the world, there usually comes with this an incentive to invest more in fewer children, as you have greater confidence they're going to be able to live.
0:12:03 SC: Okay, that's stage three?
0:12:04 JW: That's stage three.
0:12:05 SC: You have five?
0:12:06 JW: You could do five, you could do... It goes on to where actually then the population stabilizes. Now there's a fifth theory of what happens at extreme levels like we're seeing, maybe in a place like Japan or some parts of Western Europe. We haven't really got enough evidence yet in a long enough time to be able to demonstrate what happens in those societies. There's some evidence, potentially, that those levels go, people choose to have more again, but actually there's also a similar amount of evidence at the moment that they go down. And actually, we're seeing in many parts of the world that actually population, natural population levels, are going down. So Japan's levels, as we all know, the population is going down and has a real demographic change. It's stable in many parts of Western Europe and the United States, but that's primarily because of immigration. And that factors, again, into all of these arguments.
0:12:58 SC: So yeah, I wanna get deeper into this, but there's an aside because I was zooming around one of the websites you sent me to look at, global population over time. And the year 1500 surprised me a little bit, because there was a map of the world and all these different countries, color-coded on how populous they were and sort of the obvious population centers in Europe and Asia. But then there was also a pretty deep blue in present-day Mexico. And it reminded us that the Aztecs and maybe the descendants of the Mayans, and so forth, there were a lot of them. We kind of got rid of a lot them, right? But human beings have been very good at spreading themselves around the globe, not just at reproducing themselves.
0:13:39 JW: They have. And yes, and we're only... Still only discovering just how successful many of these populations were both at establishing themselves, but also managing to work out ways in which to live at larger population levels. And whether that's through intensive agriculture or collaboration, cooperation or trade, or many of these other specializations, many of these features of so-called modern societies. But of course, many of them collapsed and for a wide range of reasons.
0:14:10 SC: It's not inevitable. Friends are never inevitable. This is a good human-scale thing to remember, right?
0:14:15 JW: Absolutely, absolutely. And so... But also, none of them have at all through history ever compared to the... Now, the populations were seeing raise now. And that really has been a shift, whereby we have been able to stay in some millions of people in across countries and civilizations at some times. Now, we're talking about hundreds of millions of people and billions of people and sometimes tens of millions of people in very, very small geographic areas. And that's really novel.
0:14:46 SC: And I think one of the things I learned from reading your stuff, is probably in the back of my mind, even though I'd never quite articulated this, I probably thought of population growth as basically a story of compound interest. That there was some rate of population growth and it grew very slowly for a long time, just 'cause there was a small baseline to begin with, and it didn't grow that much. And we've been going for a long time now, so now it seems to be growing very rapidly. But that was wrong. There was really not exactly an even balance, but only a tiny bit of excess of births over deaths for a very, very long time. And it's that gap that you really refer to. And we can talk about this more, I think, right now. The change that happened in society drove the death rate down long before it drove the fertility rate down. And that's what led to this absolute spike in the population growth rate.
0:15:38 JW: Absolutely, and it is, it takes... This is where you do need demographers and you do need statisticians to be able to explain it, because it doesn't sound initially intuitive. And yet, when you see it and... So the stats always start off with... Just to surprise people and get people's attention, and... Is ask them when the rate of the human population was at its highest, the increase in population rate was at its highest and people often say about now, or last year or maybe 10 years ago, and it was around about 1962 the world's... The rate has come down of increasing around since then. But that doesn't say much about actually how the absolute population has increased since '62. And so, it is, as you say, it is at that gap. We were phenomenally successful at different points of overcoming major global influences on mortality rate. Whether it be the invention of penicillin or whether it be the understanding of just the germ theory and being able to get over these... We always forget just how many people died.
0:16:49 SC: Yeah.
0:16:50 JW: 'Cause you don't see them.
0:16:51 SC: People used to die a lot.
0:16:52 JW: People used to die a lot, as you say. And cities themselves were just clusters of death in many ways. We used to wipe out half the population of Europe at certain times, and Spanish Flu and all these others. And so, when you suddenly remove that, almost in terms of, in societal moments, a blink of an eye, the impact that has, in contributing to the world's population, suddenly starts to become more logical and rational to you.
0:17:25 SC: And it wasn't from the graphs I saw, it wasn't 'til around 1920, that the population growth rate really took off, and it peaked around in the 1960s. That was a fairly short window in which it was going crazy. It's still a little bit crazy right now, but it's way lower now than it was in the '60s. Is that safe to say?
0:17:41 JW: Yeah, absolutely. It is way lower, it is significantly lower, and it was up to 2.2% and it's way down now. And of course, it's different over different regions, but that's the other fascinating facts about this is, is how brilliant we were even as a global community way back in... Well, I say way back, in the turn of the 20th century and the 19th century, is about sharing discoveries. This is a wonderful thing of human... When we did actually discover penicillin or germ theory or these others, of course, it didn't get to many areas that still needed it and suffering continued way beyond longer than it absolutely should. But we should also, on the other hand, recognize just how brilliant we were of distributing it worldwide. And then the other thing was, is how societies have, ironically, again, how slowly, though, they did respond to that change.
0:18:37 SC: Sure.
0:18:38 JW: We didn't recognize it for a long while. We didn't know the implications of it for a long while. And the other one, which we'll get into a bit later, is we assumed that somehow people would behave differently in different parts of the world. And this is one of the things that I've always been going on for many years, and haven't, had no evidence to back it up before, which is the commonalities between people.
0:19:00 SC: Really?
0:19:01 JW: I've lived in a many, very, very different cultures to the one I was brought up in. And yet it was always very striking, and the same cultures, where both foreigners like myself and the people I live with, would always say, "Oh, no, but my society is very different, my culture's very different." And it always, no, and I was never convinced about it. And now we see this, that wherever you are in the world, the commonality between these trends. What's happening in China, what's happening in Sub-Saharan Africa, what's happening in Latin America, are incredibly similar, and actually we are a lot more similar than we are different. And that's not just a social sound bite, that's actually a...
0:19:38 SC: Yeah. No, that's very good to learn. And that feeds into the obvious question of, let's be a little bit more careful about why the population growth rate is going down. So there's a lot of factors.
0:19:46 JW: Absolutely.
0:19:47 SC: And this fact that it happens more or less universally in different places speaks to some universality, right, in what the factors are. Are there like the top two or three factors that are the most important ones in your mind?
0:19:58 JW: Yeah, well, this comes at a really interesting point of the research, because I think for us, I... My wife's very interested in women's rights and maternal health for many years when we would live in Africa and Asia. And she was always working on understanding what are the most effective drivers to support women in greater influence over their maternal... Over their own decisions, over families, and children especially. And what we see is, whilst some attempts were very culturally specific or some... What the overriding influence, or a huge influence, underestimated influence, is purely the nature of urbanization.
0:20:41 SC: Urbanization.
0:20:42 JW: Urbanization. What happens in the urbanization process. I often thought that urbanization is, many people thought, was just a feature of economic development. But I think what's underestimated is actually what happens in urban environments. I think immediate access, greater access to education, to basic resources and sanitation, to the ability to... The reduction in mortality levels and therefore the inclination to invest more. The cost of education and yet the impact of a good education. You can still get highly educated in many rural areas of the world and have no sort of social mobility and no chances of actually increasing that. In a city, that really does open up.
0:21:28 SC: There's more leverage for education when you're in a city. There's a lot of opportunities, and a lot of diverse things that you could do.
0:21:33 JW: Absolutely, and yet many of us have these preconceived ideas of... We look at these or even slums and we look at cities and we look how filthy and disgusting they are, and we look at these bucolic scenes in the countryside and say, "How lovely." Well, just take a look at those numbers. Take a look at the stats. You do not want to be poor in the countryside. It's great for us, when we get our second houses and we want to go back and we're living in a high governance environment, and that's great. But you do not want to be poor or a woman in those environments. And actually, the stats on everything from child mortality, to abuse, to women's rights, they're much worse in in these areas than cities, even sometimes these low income slum areas. What happens in them is fascinating. The evidence of how they mobilize and change, how people's decision changes, and how people access the ability to be able to move socially is quite stark.
0:22:29 SC: And there's another aside, but I think it's one worth getting to, then we'll come back to the cities and population growth. But you touched on the idea that there is a moral aspect to help people think about these things, right? Maybe moral is even too strong, but there is a romantic aspect of living in the countryside, living off the land, and so forth, and people who are not professional demographers or population geneticists and so forth might think that there's just something better about having fewer people living in agrarian society, like Thomas Jefferson would have thought this, right? And vice versa. There's other people who think that economic growth is the best, and Steven Pinker has taught us that economic growth gets us out of everything, and people object to that, and back and forth. How much of this... So, number one, how much of this do you have to confront when you're talking about this and talking to other people? Number two: How much work do you have to do to control your own cognitive biases this way and make sure you're not just figuring out the result you want, then saying, "That's what we should do"?
0:23:32 JW: Yeah, well, of course, I have complete access to the truth and I'm not biased in any way, shape or form.
0:23:38 SC: It is helpful when you're finding that. Yeah. I've met plenty of people like you. You're not alone.
0:23:43 JW: So, first of all, the overriding thing for me, the simplest thing for me is, in all this, is I think it's about choice. And I think the most interesting thing has been where... Has been the impact that has happened globally, when societies, especially governments, have actually given choice to their people. So post-Tiananmen Square, really, and what happened then, and it put the fear of God into the Chinese government, much of their response was around a couple of things. It was around nationalism, and also around wealth creation. And one of the things they did then... They just made it easy for people to move, and Deng Xiaoping's efforts to be able to free up the control they had about that. And what did people do? They did what people do everywhere in the world, is that people urbanize...
0:24:28 SC: Moved to the city.
0:24:28 JW: And they moved to the cities. And then China's... They moved to the coastal cities predominantly, but elsewhere. In African governments, when they... And elsewhere, when they had forcibly moved people to borders, because of course people often do that to protect and fearful all across the world, not just in Africa. And they put people in god-awful conditions and are displaced for that, and they're kept there for generations. And yet, when people relax those moves, what do people do? They move. And it's the greatest indication of what is, I think, probably what is right, is actually just looking across what happens when people, A, have the choice and B, most importantly, or as importantly, have the ability to take advantage of that choice. It's all very well to have a choice, but if you can't afford to move, or if there are other things keeping you there, then it's worthless. And so that's really what's happened in much of the world.
0:25:25 JW: And that part of the message, and I'm not saying this disparagingly at all, this is a pro-liberty, pro-capitalism kind of thing, that letting people be the individual makers of their own choices can make things better for everyone.
0:25:39 SC: Oh, absolutely. Yes. The amount of... The nature and the direction of criticism sometimes to some of these arguments has been interesting, and it's sometimes very hard to get back to the facts and the issues at hand because, again, people see their own politics through some of these facts. But it's right. A lot of our work is building on demographers and professionals in this very, I think, fascinating realm, and people like Brian O'Neill at the University of Denver, people like Branko Milanović, who have done a lot of work understanding about the economics of, and the demographics of this. And what's really... And this, for me, was a great eye-opener. The main author of the paper that we did, Eric Sanderson, is actually an urban conservationist. And he wrote a fascinating book on Mannahatta, what Manhattan was like before it became Manhattan, and...
0:26:35 SC: It's not done becoming Manhattan. It's still changing really rapidly, right?
0:26:38 JW: Well, exactly. And that's actually the overall thrust of his work, and actually to continue to conceive of what it could be like and what we could do. But also... I had no experience of cities. I've lived my life in Cambodia and Gabon and Vietnam and Zambia and places like that. And so I've come at it from looking at the countries about going through their transition, and watching and looking at societies through that. The coupling with people like Eric is I'd have to think about cities and what happens within cities, really, has been the real change, and I think these... What the demographers have really done have come up with these shared socio-economic pathways, I.e., what the world probably could look like in... And this is so important to all of our work. There's very, very few industries where... Maybe your own, where this isn't actually... Where this isn't actually an important feature to understand.
0:27:31 SC: Well, yeah. Great. So that brings us exactly back to where I wanted to pick up. I asked, what are the most important causal factors helping lower the population growth rate? And one might have guessed, if you did a poll on the street, people would have said things like healthcare, education, just overall economic wealth. But your first word is "cities."
0:27:52 JW: Yeah. The first word... And it really is cities, not because it is the only thing out there, but it's the thing that both are almost... It's almost a ubiquitous feature of all these trends that are going on around the world at the moment, because also, they have a number of features that we tend to see as a consequence rather than as a cause.
0:28:14 SC: Exactly. Right. So all these things I just mentioned, maybe you're going say, come out more naturally, or at least more readily, when we're in this urban environment?
0:28:22 JW: Yeah. Take an issue of female empowerment is a crucial one. The world's population is going to be influenced by a billion people, according to whether or not we educate Sub-Saharan African girls over the next 30 years. And that, to me, is an astounding fact.
0:28:41 SC: Sub-Saharan Africa being the area of the world where the population is still going like gangbusters, really?
0:28:47 JW: It's about to hit its second phase in demographic transition, where it's just about to get into...
0:28:52 SC: They're gonna stop dying as quickly, but they're not gonna stop having kids right away.
0:28:55 JW: That's right. They are already, for a bunch of reasons, have, for external and internal reasons, have been delayed in hitting the demographic transition. They're gonna be going through it. The population rate is still going up, not just the absolute population. Cities have historically not been great urban creators of jobs and these, and ideations and all these features, and yet they are starting to now. There's gonna be a huge increase. There's gonna be a massive reduction in poverty as well. It's going on already. I'm sorry, I should have said. The poverty levels in Sub-Saharan Africa, against many people's awareness, are actually going down quite considerably and fantastically, and they're gonna continue to go down, even though the population is going to go up. That's most of people's prediction.
0:29:44 SC: Is Sub-Saharan Africa urbanizing rapidly?
0:29:47 SC: Not as rapidly as many other areas, and their transition might be slower and have a different... There might be a different cadence to their development, but essentially, it's the same transition. One of the things that will come out at the very end of this will be that, what the world really needs to do is help African cities function.
0:30:09 SC: Right.
0:30:09 JW: My goodness, if you could make African cities work and function in the way that my adopted city New York or Shanghai or many of the other cities or some positive African city examples already can do, in places like Kigali or some of those areas, that will have an enormous impact on a whole range of factors.
0:30:30 SC: And is this a political, governmental, challenge?
0:30:33 JW: It is everything from just a municipal... Just getting the... It is a governmental infrastructure. This goes all the way from very, very basic things like transport. Getting... I say simple, of course, it's not. It's highly complicated.
0:30:48 JW: But the concept at least is very simple. Water or sanitation.
0:30:53 SC: Right.
0:30:53 JW: And transport, housing, all those things, all the way up to having a civil society that is both demanding and voting and advocating for these things.
0:31:01 SC: Right? Okay, but do you think... So you think it is happening, but that is... It's an interesting, as a scientist, it's fascinating, right? 'Cause you get to see the thing that we went through a couple of hundred years ago and it's going through Sub-Saharan Africa now.
0:31:13 JW: Yes. And it's not as if we're devoid of examples. Rwanda really is a fantastic example of a country that has faced monumental challenges and setbacks and yet with a highly dense human population, it has managed to restructure and work itself through this transition. At the moment, it's more ahead of the curve than many Sub-Saharan African countries, even though it doesn't quite have the necessarily, the natural resources of a Botswana or a South Africa or many of these other countries. And so there is again this other argument, which I reject, which is that somehow there are circumstances which makes Africa any different.
0:31:54 SC: Right. Okay, that was very interesting. And also, so I just wanna go back to this. My mind is not letting go of this issue of the causal factors 'cause they are all... It's all back and forth, right? Presumably urbanization depends on wealth and education and things like that. What makes people decide to go to the cities?
0:32:15 JW: So again, I think many of the reasons people go to the cities... First of all, we're predominantly talking about youth here. Is that your... You look at... I was up in the borders of... The China, Russia border where we, for many years, have been trying to work on wild tigers in those areas. And on the Russia side, they've got tigers and in China really, they have had this population which has always and understandably, consumed a lot of the prey base of tigers and they've lived up in the border area, security's been this big... And now that's no longer. A lot of those areas are being naturally depopulated.
0:32:52 SC: Of people?
0:32:52 JW: Of people, because the youth are moving away and you've got these rather, and frankly, rather sad populations up here of just remnant... People who are... They're just going to age out of the population. But youth move for, obviously, access to jobs, the ability for social mobility, for a whole range of opportunities that are presented in the cities. Now, we might still think they are terrible, abusive places for those areas. But this is actually... The economies come from these areas. They generate the middle classes. The urban middle classes are almost invariably across the world the single greatest drivers for good, for social change in countries, whether they be in totalitarian countries, whether they be in all others. And so, yes, there are negative aspects. We should not ignore that. There are social inequality aspects. There are a whole bunch of other issues in there. But what we are seeing across the world, is that this process of people choosing to move, creating wealth, moving through society, having greater traction and influence over their governments, and ultimately where the environmental movement comes from, we should always never forget, they're not rural movements.
0:34:05 SC: No, I noticed that. That was hilarious, that basically all these great conservationist movements come out of big cities.
0:34:10 JW: Yeah, absolutely. And New York, and then the Roosevelts and the rest of them, they were wealthy, influential urbanites who basically... And we shouldn't just ignore the elites. The middle classes around the world. When I first, I wanna say just this one story. When I first as a, basically a kid, I went to Southwest India as my first real exploration into conservation and I almost quit there and then. I almost went back, because what I saw in India, just outside Bangalore in Karnataka, was these tiny, almost remnant pockets of nature, stuffed with large... Small numbers of tigers and elephants in that, surrounded by this sea of poverty. It really was shocking for me.
0:35:02 SC: It was depressing. Yeah.
0:35:02 JW: It was deep... Not only was it depressing, and as a privileged guy from England to be able to see it, it was shocking. But the real depressing thing was that I saw no future. I didn't see how it was going to change.
0:35:17 SC: It was just gonna get worse...
0:35:19 JW: And what hope for these tiny islands? Even if I didn't have any sort of moral quandaries about what was happening with the human population. Just on a biological one, what was the future with just these last remnants? And then I would also read things like the people who established Yellowstone National Park in the States and people like that. They were equally dumbfounded. They thought when they established Yellowstone this was going to be the last remnants of the West. They were down to the last few hundred bison. The whole place was just open for... Was environmental carnage. And their language was very desperate and what it meant to be able to save one of these places. And they didn't have a future either. They did it without any sense of what could be. Now, I went back 25 years later, to... I went back 20 years ago, 20 years later, and it was the most encouraging and astounding thing I've ever seen because not only was... Where I'm seeing Bangalore, sure it was harder for me to get around Bangalore, but let's face it, that's a reasonable sacrifice to what I was seeing.
0:36:22 SC: Exactly. That's okay.
0:36:22 JW: Which is an immense accumulation of people into the city, into urban Bangalore. I saw poverty rates disappearing down through the floor; of course, they're still bad and they need to get better, but compared to where they were, they have gone down. You got this...
0:36:38 SC: It's okay to say both of those things. I know poverty is very bad, we don't like it, we should keep fighting against it, but it's actually getting better.
0:36:46 JW: It is a real challenge. You often say something very positive and people infer that you have said something that...
0:36:51 SC: You're quite, yeah, right.
0:36:52 JW: Negates the negatives... All the negatives. And so it's a little boring, it's a little repetitious but...
0:36:58 SC: But poverty bad, we would like to be better.
0:37:00 JW: So what I saw, though, and was encouraging, is Nikon, one of the largest markets for Nikon Zoom lenses had become Bangalore. Why? Because these wealthy middle class, not... The middle class of Bangalore were now taking these cameras and going back out to these places where I had been 25 years ago and now they were the ones that are paying for, advocating for, voting for nature. And whilst for many years it was dependent on organizations like myself to be able to prop up the last places where their societies could not afford or were not interested in being able to conserve these areas, luckily not fully the case in India. India's always had this connection to nature, but... But now it was these... It had been taken over by the middle classes and that's of course what we want, we want these people. And they were connecting up nature and we had... For us, we had an ambition of, I think, 400 tigers in this large connected landscape.
0:38:01 JW: We're now having to double that estimation of what we should have in those areas. And we're having to readjust our ambitions for nature in the face of what was almost an impenetrable gloom because now these reversals are happening, not just because of freeing up of space. And too many people obsess about the idea of freeing up space, this idea of people moving off the land, therefore nature can thrive. That's an element of this, we've got to be very cautious, because of course consumption increases, we could push off our consumption and pressure... Agricultural pressure to somewhere else. But the most important thing is that it produces the same environmentalists that came out of London 300 years ago, or New York City 150 years ago, are exactly the same people they're creating in Bangalore, in Nairobi, in these areas, and again, it points to the similarity issues.
0:38:55 SC: And this is the punchy message, I think this is the sort of the deep paradoxical thing that comes through from your work. You're basically saying that cities are really good for nature and people don't wanna hear that, or maybe it's just because they haven't thought about it very carefully, but there are people... The people aren't going away, we don't want the people to go away, but if we put them in concentrated urban environments then that can help nature not only be sustained but recover. There's a race, there are extinctions, that is also bad, extinction also bad, but maybe what we're seeing is a phase transition from the transition where there weren't that many people... I mean, people were basically another animal species that build houses and so forth, and then there was this technological revolution, the human population grew enormously, but rather than just growing exponentially and having more human biomass than the mass of the Earth in a few hundred years, there's a new equilibrium that we can reach with way more people, but still a whole bunch of nature more or less thriving.
0:40:00 JW: Absolutely. I think there's a few things to unpack there. There's the first one, about people need to be really aware that cities are the greatest drivers of bringing about a stabilization of the world's population. And we've really got to come to terms with that, because often people see almost cities as the exemplar of an uncontrolled human population, and that's actually the reverse. And that's really one thing we got to get across. Now, of course...
0:40:28 SC: I mean, you mentioned, I think, in the paper Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. We've read these novels about the terrible conditions in cities in that transitional age, but it gets better.
0:40:37 JW: But it does get better and... And if it didn't get better, people wouldn't choose to move there and consistent across areas. Now, of course, there are worse cities and if... There are poorly functioning cities and there are fantastic cities, but essentially, even the poor cities are still magnets, and where people have choices, people stay. And even when people have levels of wealth they don't necessarily leave, they move in the city and they of course, they... But they also advocate for better cities, and that's a transition that really is very influential. That transition from having no traction and no influence to more and how one uses that to improve the quality. All the environmental movements came actually from the brown... What we call a brown environment, which is pollution, so essentially people moved to cities, massive wealth creation, but with that was a lot of pollution, and it made these conditions miserable. And then those same people that benefited are now suffering from that, started advocating for better environmental conditions. And as that grew out, so it spread up into the green and demanding nature and that again. So there is this necessary transition; of course, if we can find ways of skipping that or hastening that transition, great.
0:41:49 SC: Yeah, and maybe we can. Maybe there are some policies that can make it happen faster, right?
0:41:54 JW: There absolutely are ways. We don't have to return the mistakes, but essentially we have... And this gets back also to the poverty issue, which is, cities drive people out of poverty. These drives... It'd be very hard to imagine China, which has been the sole responsibility for the greatest number of people moving out of poverty in the history of mankind, in the last 30 years. It is very hard to imagine how that could have possibly been done in an agrarian society.
0:42:26 SC: Well, in fact, the previous 30 years were not kind to China and largely... Some of that was forced agrarianism.
0:42:32 JW: Oh, absolutely. And even in our own... So in many ways, their policies weren't actually set. They didn't know how it was exactly going to happen, but they did know that they needed to uncouple... To allow people to have greater volition, and that was a very smart decision and everyone panicked about the one-child policy and the revocation of that in China. It's been utterly overwhelmed that... Maybe almost...
0:43:02 SC: It's insignificant compared to...
0:43:03 JW: But yes, absolutely, by the process of urbanization and wealth creation. But so, people fixate too much about the wealth creation, which is a bit, very significant. But I do wanna move, if it's okay, on to the impacts of that.
0:43:17 SC: Not yet, I have a point to make, which I think you'll like. I actually have a couple points, one is, I had Geoffrey West on the Podcast, he was an early guest, and he loves making this point about how ideas and patents and insights grow super linearly with population density that... And let's let ourselves be a little bit romantic. Not about the countryside, but about intellectual life. And one of the wonderful things about cities is, by bringing different people into close contact with each other physically, as well as socially and so forth, new ideas are struck, right? And that's such a pleasant, happy story in my mind that I just wanna keep saying it over over again. If you're going to agree.
0:44:01 JW: I couldn't agree more. Very hard to disagree with Geoffrey West on a lot of stuff, his work is fantastic, and Scale especially, and other. But yeah, we call it ideation. The ability to share, it is a fundamental feature of humans. The reason why we have either made so much progress or in some people's eyes, so much destruction, is because we learnt how both to store information and to be able to share information, and whether one talks about language or whether one talks about other mechanisms, that really is so central to the pace of human development, and cities are extraordinary to be able to do that. Every country I've lived in and I've lived in very, very different countries for most of my life, the trends are the same, country people are a bit slow and a bit dumb.
0:44:53 SC: Physically slow, they walk... And that's one of the...
0:44:58 JW: They're the jokes around... One of my interests is always listening to how... Getting the jokes of any country I live in, and what they make fun of and who they make fun of and how they do. And of course, most of it is unrepeatable. But there are certain commonalities, and of course, not because there's any actual difference between these people.
0:45:17 SC: Same people.
0:45:17 JW: But because people underestimate how much access they have to, how much information and how smart people are at being able to filter and take information for their own interests, even when they don't realize it. And of course, cities are just the great drivers of ideation and the increase in populations, as he far more eloquently puts in his work, are the great drivers of thought processes, and of course are amazing at sharing. And again, and that's the big thing, historically people can hide ideas and keep it to themselves and people can still make great profit from it, but it is all linked to being able to share that information and insight, and that's a wonderful thing.
0:46:01 SC: There's a natural question which I also asked Geoffrey, I'll ask you too. Is there a sense in which or a respect to which the internet and the increased connectivity between people will start playing a role more globally that cities have played traditionally in that respect?
0:46:18 JW: Yes, I think it's all very much part of the same. I think they've appeared as little islands. There's a physical issue of cities and there's a technical issue of internet, but actually what's happening is they're blurring, and all these differences between the connections we're making. We're obviously speaking at a very delicate time, where the social media and the use of news and information, and is, we're just only now exploring the dark side of it and the negative aspects of this. But still, it is massively outweighed, massively outweighed by the positives.
0:46:51 SC: "There were poor houses in London," Charles Dickens tells me.
0:46:55 JW: Exactly. And so, whilst terrible ideas can be shared more readily as well, we just need to make sure we understand that far more scary at the moment is, is being able to slow down those positive ideas for the fear about the negative ideas.
0:47:11 SC: Does that suggest that we should be even more enthusiastic than we are about bringing laptops and internet connectivity to Sub-Saharan Africa?
0:47:19 JW: Absolutely, absolutely. I think, again, I think we should be providing any sort of options that they choose to be able to do. Again, for me, it's about choice. It is not telling anyone what they should or should not do. Certainly not Sub-Saharan Africa, there's not been a great history of that in the past and...
0:47:39 SC: By all means let them make some choices for themselves.
0:47:40 JW: Absolutely, but my confidence is that they're going to choose very similar mechanisms. But also, they have the chance, many ways to leapfrog whole generations of things that are no longer useful. When I was living in Africa, cellphones came and completely jumped fixed line systems in many parts. Not all, but many parts.
0:48:01 SC: It was wonderful.
0:48:02 JW: And what an amazing thing to do. And actually, they were at the forefront, and Africa still is very much at the forefront of using technologies in social ways, and us learning from that. I think that's going to increase dramatically. I think the learning is gonna come way, way... In two ways now, but our only thing is we should continue the communication, keep all lines open. And of course, this still gets eventually back to the immigration question.
0:48:27 SC: Sure, yes. Do you want to tell about the immigration question? Where do you wanna go? I wanted to ask you about inequality, but maybe that was part of where you wanted to go anyway.
0:48:36 JW: No, we can... Any way you want is fine.
0:48:39 SC: I've been agreeing with you too much here, let's just imagine what the disagreement would be. Wealth creation happens in cities, sure. But couldn't one make the argument, I'm not sure if I believe it, but couldn't one make the argument that stratification also happens? We mentioned Manhattan and I can certainly see a future where 50 years from now, no middle class people can live in Manhattan. It's becoming a playground for the wealthy. Is that bad?
0:49:04 JW: Yeah, inequality is definitely an issue. There's a lot of debate around it and is a very valid debate. And again, I'm gonna slightly make you wince a little bit 'cause I'm gonna say it's good and it's a bit bad. Because of course, one can look at it in two very distinct ways. The level of capture of the 0.1% or whatever it is, over the last few years, has been phenomenal, unprecedented and we can only begin to understand what the implications of that kind of capture of wealth really is. And I don't claim to know or sit here and espouse on that.
0:49:43 SC: But maybe that is something where, rather than letting nature take its course, this is an obvious place where the government could help fix things a little bit, right?
0:49:49 JW: It could be. And this really does get outside of really my... And the implications of that.
0:49:53 SC: Sure. Of course.
0:49:55 JW: But I would like to say that one also has got to recognize, and they're not totally unrelated, is that those same drivers that have caused the creation of that wealth and however it's been captured, and we can talk about it, but anyway, have fundamentally driven hundreds of millions or billions of people out of extreme poverty. And if one looks at the work of Milanović and others who have looked at inequality and some of these very impressive reports that have come out on this, again, they indicate two very separate things, and we can debate how separate they actually are, but does one measure inequality from the absolute lowest to the absolute highest? Does one do it from the top 5% to the bottom 5%? You can measure in many different ways, and sometimes it can look appalling and ugly, and sometimes it can look truly glorious. If one looks at inequality as literally how many people... The worst case surely would be people getting richer and people getting poorer at the same time.
0:50:56 SC: Right. [0:50:56] ____.
0:50:57 JW: That would be the ultimate worst. And that's not happening. That's really not happening.
0:51:01 SC: The poor are getting less poor in an absolute sense.
0:51:03 JW: Absolutely. And that is in terms of numbers of people. That is much higher than the actual capture, the number of people who are disproportionately profiting from...
[overlapping conversation]
0:51:14 SC: And much of that is driven by Africa and Asia, right?
0:51:17 JW: Which aspect of it? Sorry, the...
0:51:18 SC: The fact that poor people are coming out of poverty.
0:51:20 JW: Yeah. Yes, those are the two large regions, although, of course, within those regions, Asia has this great difference between historically still wealthy countries like Japan and elsewhere, and some of the poorest countries in the world. So it's much more diverse than say, Sub-Saharan Africa. And of course, Latin America has had significant variation as well. But yes, the real move out of poverty has been, purely numerically has been out of China and East and Southeast Asia.
0:51:52 SC: Can we imagine that poverty will literally end someday, that we don't always have this inequality?
0:52:03 JW: What stuns me, and one of the things I often show people is a chart of what's happening to poverty around the world. And I say there are two things to look at. One, just look how incredibly steep that drop-off is, however you measure it. I have a long argument about whether it's $1, $1.5, $2 a day in how we measure extreme poverty. However you measure it, the drop-off is extreme and how ubiquitous it is. And sure, it is slower in some areas and...
0:52:31 SC: It's not just that someone was clever in some country, it seems to be, once again, a universal aspect of this kind of process.
0:52:37 JW: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's so encouraging to be able to see. And again, there's got to be... It's such a massive influence on my business, worrying about the future of nature and natural resources. I'm just continuously stunned at how few people actually are aware of this, understand this, and are willing to debate the implications of this. But the drop-off in extreme poverty... You know, when the international community came around and set what's called the Sustainable Development Goals, now they looked at halving poverty and doing it, they did it.
0:53:09 SC: Yeah.
0:53:09 JW: No, they did it. I'm not saying it's because they set...
[overlapping conversation]
0:53:11 SC: So we should had a party for that, but yeah.
0:53:13 JW: And now they've had to revise it and now they're doing to actually eradicate extreme poverty. Now, when I was a kid, those kind of things like were a joke, you said, "Oh, what do you want, world peace? Or what do you want, to eradicate poverty?" They were kind of like, okay, it would never happen. And I think you go back to the '70s, you go back to the '60s and you will be hard pushed to find the most optimistic of those professionals and academics who really could envisage what has happened over the last few decades.
0:53:41 SC: Okay, where did I cut you off before? Do you remember?
0:53:47 JW: You drew me into inequality.
0:53:48 SC: I drew you into inequality but there was something you wanted to do and I interrupted you to talk about... I forget what it was anyway, but I could just keep asking questions, if that's okay?
0:53:56 JW: Sure, yeah.
0:53:56 SC: Okay. So what is the future that we're imagining here? People are moving into cities. Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series imagined that the galaxy was ruled by Trantor, a whole planet with nothing but cities on it. Is that your goal? Is that what you want?
[laughter]
0:54:14 JW: I would like to see... I think that's a really interesting question because I don't think it's asked enough, which is, "Describe a world." Of course, avoid the kind of cheesy soundbites and man living at one with nature. But actually describe physically, what actually you should do, and we should be doing that more often. People like ourselves should be challenged to do that more often, 'cause we're terrible... We're very good about saying what's wrong.
[laughter]
0:54:37 JW: And we're very good about telling people how we're the solution to something, which of course, increasingly, we're finding is not correct. And yet we're very bad at describing the world we want to live in. And that should be it. And I think for... Many of us would actually come across the same foundations. And I think most people understand and appreciate that having a stable human population really is a goal that we should be looking for.
0:55:04 SC: And an attainable one, amazingly.
0:55:07 JW: And absolutely attainable. But let's even put aside attainable at the moment. Just what it looks like. I don't think it really matters if it's six billion or it's eight billion or even if it's 10 billion, or even if it's 12 billion. Sure, they come with different challenges. The overriding issue, it's got to somehow stabilize. The other one is, I think, let's face it, we should have no poverty. We've got to get rid of this. Aside from the moral imperative, there is also a livability imperative, is that actually the things that poverty can used to generate and cause, means that we'll never be able to achieve many other things if it wasn't there. But of course, there is that overriding moral imperative that we should have nobody continuing to live in poverty.
0:55:47 JW: And then the third one is... And this relates both as a cause and effect. We need this connected world. Yes, of course, we hope to maintain different cultures and diversity within us and we hope that we all don't just homogenize and it's all the same. And yet the shared sense of values, this self-improvement, this drive towards really does move more smooth and quickly when people are connected and together. And I think it's also the one way for us truly to reach this point where we're making global decisions about global issues that are in our shared interest, as opposed to fragmented ones.
0:56:27 JW: And I think that's not just a rather cheesy soundbite. I think it's something we're moving towards, especially as we start to see cities, city-states reappear. Now, they disappeared in Renaissance Italy, they're reappearing now, with California as a state starting to make global climate change decisions. We're seeing New York City taking up and disregarding, really, what is happening at the larger, national level. And we're seeing this in Shanghai, we're seeing this in many parts of the world. And so, that's shifting. But that connectivity, those three things, those three features I don't think were really attainable in many people's eyes not long ago. And I think not only are they attainable, I think they're happening. Now, it is not inevitable. That's the one thing, just keep saying. This is... We need to take concerted action to make sure they happen. And of course, we can still achieve all those things and destroy nature. And that's the other aspect of this. There's no reason why we can't stabilize the world at 12 billion people, have people probably urbanized, have people connected, out of extreme poverty, and yet there's very, very little of nature left.
0:57:38 SC: But let's see, we have seven and some billion people in the world now, right? So 12 billion is not a crazy number. The world is still mostly nature compared to city. What fraction of the earth's land surface is covered by urban environment?
0:57:53 JW: Oh, I think it's about 5%. I think it's likely to get up to 7% maybe in the next few years, something like that.
0:58:01 SC: And we're imagining that that's not just a stepping stone, that could... As far as what you're saying is concerned, that could be a new stable equilibrium?
0:58:08 JW: Yeah, absolutely, it could... If you imagine that most of the world would be in some... Let's say under 10% of the world's in 10% of the land, that's extraordinary. Of course, there's agriculture and there's productivity that we've got to take into account. And there's other aspects of it. But yeah, I think the scale of these issues and numbers is something that we've got to get our heads around. Of course, we should also... That people, again, don't like... Sometimes people don't like cities. Cities are improving. My goodness, you go and speak to someone what it was like to live where I live in New York back in the '70s.
0:58:43 SC: I live in Los Angeles, so yeah, there's been a lot of improvement. That's right.
0:58:46 JW: And we fail to recognize it. And it's not just for necessarily our income levels and our areas. It's true for many. Now, of course, as soon as we stop, we start saying that, people imagine that we are becoming complacent about the existing issues and we're not doing that. However, cities continue and improve. One can imagine a world whereby, let's say, even 15% of the world is covered by urban areas. Let's say even 20%. It doesn't really matter in those areas. The possibilities for not just stopping the decline in nature, but then recovering it across that 80%. Or, obviously, agriculture and others is enormous, but one cannot do that if the population continues to grow, there is no tail-off in sight, people are in continuing poverty. Remembering that this is the point I actually wanted to get to, which was when people start consuming, when is the greatest draw-down on nature? Is it by me, in the middle classes moving up to the upper classes? No. It's obviously, actually, it's a movement of people out of extreme poverty...
0:59:53 SC: Who use nothing.
0:59:54 JW: Who use nothing. The example I give is, you give someone in poverty a dollar, most of that dollar, if not all, will go on natural resources, food, and understandably so, and is on transitions that, "You give me a dollar now, I will waste it on an apple, or may save it or may use it for other purposes and a far smaller portion of that dollar will go on natural resources." And that's where really the consumption occurs. Now, what people will often criticize this kind of language and our work on, is by saying, "But when people in cities, they get wealthy and then they consume more." Absolutely, but that is a necessary transition for us to get to a stage whereby you have those foundational situations, that you have the urbanites, you have the world's population stabilized and you have people urban. Now, that comes at a cost. There isn't a society out there that hasn't through some form converted natural capital to economic capital in driving their economy out of a position of poverty.
1:01:02 JW: Now, sure, we could find ways to ameliorate that or to speed up the process or to lessen the impact, but essentially, we have... There is a toll to be paid. When China went through, is still going through, but really moved huge numbers of people out of property. There was no obvious way to do that in the speed they'd done it without having a toll on nature in those areas.
1:01:27 SC: And maybe this is just so obvious we haven't said it yet, but if you have two people of equal wealth, one of them lives in a suburban split level and one of them lives in an urban apartment. The one in the city is gonna use a lot less electricity, gas, things like that, it's easier to heat an apartment, than it is a house.
1:01:43 JW: Absolutely. So the stats are... I live in New York City, again, and for the average New Yorker per capita versus the average American, the New Yorker uses 74% less water consumption, they use 35% less electricity, they use 45% less municipal solid waste, I.e, garbage, per person per week. And that's, those are extraordinary numbers, and that, by the way, that person is not a better human being.
1:02:16 SC: That's not why.
[overlapping conversation]
1:02:18 JW: They're not a morally superior person. But even, as a measure for income, their impact are tremendous. So, yes, there's two things. And these are the two categories. Cities can be greener and can be green in of themselves and also cities have a profound and unrecognized impact on the rest of the world.
1:02:35 SC: Right. Is there still, are we nevertheless helping herself to something we shouldn't here? If we have this new equilibrium, where most people are living in cities and the population is stabilized, but we're still, whether gradually or not, using up some finite resources here on Earth, right, if nothing else, precious metals. We haven't even mentioned the words climate change, I don't think, which is kind of a big deal. Those are the dark clouds on the horizon. How worried should we be about these things?
1:03:05 JW: Yeah, so a lot of our paper's been written with the tacit recognition of a couple of things. The first one is that climate change is the biggest issue facing our planet today.
1:03:16 SC: Pretty short term worrying, right?
1:03:17 JW: Absolutely.
1:03:18 SC: Short term not in the sense it's also not a long term worry, but an imminent worry.
1:03:22 JW: An immediate worry, yeah, absolutely, and also that, of course, that we know to some extent that technology and those things are going to improve dramatically and continue on this existing trajectory of amazing achievement and amazing new inventions. And that can often, both people think is a curse, but often, actually, it has historically been a cure to many things. Now, we don't follow particularly the, "Don't worry, technology will solve it all." There are people out there who...
1:03:56 SC: We have to remember you are a conservationist by occupation, you're not actually like just a Pollyanna.
1:04:01 JW: Absolutely, but there are people out there who just say, "Look, technology has always solved something and it'll always solve it now, just 'cause we don't know what it is, that's there... " That's not good enough and that's not sufficient enough. And so, but we're quite convinced that in a world where people are educated, urbanized, connected and in that, they are going to be making far better decisions and far better decisions on the consumption and the nature of impacts of this world, than we have done in the past. So they're going to be far better conservationists, environmentalists, whether they live in downtown Manhattan or the top of a mountain in Montana.
1:04:45 SC: That makes sense to me, do we have data about the attitudes toward climate change of urban people, versus rural people?
1:04:52 JW: Yeah. Yeah, basically people in urban areas are much more likely to vote with these issues in mind, they tend to be the founders of a lot of sustainable use and a lot of the movements around the environment. They again come from urban areas. So you just look at today about some of the... Whether it would be the plastics movement, which is a very novel thing coming out of protecting the oceans, or on climate change and these things, they are from urbanites in these areas. And people... You look at the number of people who now choose to have plant-based diets for the sake of the environment.
1:05:35 SC: That is another very interesting thing. I'm sorry, finish that thought.
1:05:40 JW: They tend to be urbanites.
1:05:40 SC: They tend to be urbanites, which I was gonna guess. Okay, but isn't it also true that the overall trend is that people in urban environments eat more meat than people in rural environments?
1:05:53 JW: Yes. But that's the transition...
1:05:55 SC: Is that a transitional period?
1:05:56 JW: That's the transition. So nobody eat proportionately... The big consumption of meat comes at the change, so that big change in meat, comes when you go from very poor, which of course, because you almost invariably cannot eat meat, to effectively some set over the middle classes, let's just use that as a broad term at the moment, but you move out of poverty and that's when most people around the world choose, with the exception of big parts of India [1:06:20] ____, they generally choose to eat meat. And that's where the consumption patterns change. So now, of course, beyond that, the increase in wealth level has less and less impact on the quantity of meat you eat.
1:06:35 SC: I hope the amount of meat I eat is not proportional to my income, I guess that would be bad.
1:06:39 JW: Yeah. And increasingly, what we're seeing now is a tail-off. We're actually seeing more people who are relatively wealthy and relatively... And obesity used to be a sign of wealth and now...
1:06:54 SC: Thinness is more of, yeah.
1:06:54 JW: Yeah, and now look how it's reversed. And you see a real tail-off in people who have more options, who are wealthier, more privileged, making choices to consume less meat.
1:07:03 SC: This is hitting home. You're telling me that my voracious meat-eating is because I grew up in a lower middle-class household and I've reached upper middle-class professor-dom, and now that explains... Those social conditions explain my personal choices.
1:07:15 JW: I'd be less forgiving in that analysis, I think. But now that you have the privilege and position to make the decision...
1:07:21 SC: Well, maybe next I will be making the decision. I think, this is a sideline of course, but I do know that our current agricultural practices are an enormous driver of climate change, right? Maybe they're not sustainable very long term. I'm kind of crossing my fingers that scientists are gonna build better hamburgers in the laboratory in the petri dishes and so I won't have to give it up entirely but... Because I'm not quite convinced by the moral arguments, but I'm not at all convinced that I'm not just convincing myself to not be convinced on the moral arguments 'cause I really like eating good meat.
1:07:57 JW: Yeah. And there's no question that food consumption is one of the great drivers of the loss of nature and we should be very, very clear about that. But it's not just about purely about wealth, there are plenty of decisions one could make at any... Except the extreme poor, there are many, many decisions that individuals in societies can take that have a tremendous impact on the environment that is not just linked to increase in wealth. And actually, the wealthier we become, the more options we have to be able to choose to avoid that negative impact. So the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon is not palm oil; by an order of magnitude it is feeding the beef industry. And so we often associate, "Sure, at the moment, the US, they eat a lot of meat and a lot of that comes from those areas and, of course, soy products which go into cattle lots and feeds, both the meat and dairy." And one of the challenges that individuals face with, especially with these large global issues like global climate change and others is, "What on earth can little old me do?" And there's never been a better opportunity...
1:09:15 SC: Collective action problems.
1:09:16 JW: Collective action... But even personal responsibility. Sure, we can get rid of... We can take minor steps, but there's a real phenomenal opportunity. If you wanna really make an impact, just eat less meat. And I can give you a metric for actually how that hits water consumption, which of course is a real growing issue of our age, how much acres of forest will be prevented from being cut down. And you can hear all these stats about, "Well, yes, almonds take water and soy takes water," and all those others. Nothing comes close on order of magnitude to hitting the beef, and that's without even considering all the other climate change impacts of that.
1:10:01 SC: Right. And so... And you're not... You're being very careful not to say, "Become a vegetarian," you're saying eating less meat is very, very helpful.
1:10:09 JW: Eating less. I think...
1:10:10 SC: It's probably healthier, too.
1:10:11 JW: Oh, it's obvious. There is a confluence of opportunity. There are three reasons why people go vegetarian, plant-based or vegan, and they are ethical, health and environmental. Now, each of us has different views on the importance of each of those three and where we sit on those. And almost all of us, like myself, con ourselves and convince ourselves on others. But what you do have is a wonderful confluence of, by taking a few common actions which aren't actually that big, one can have impacts on all three of those. Straight away. No question.
1:10:50 SC: Well, that's good because... So maybe to finish up I liked it when you sketched out a vision for what the future could be, the good future that we might be heading toward, and that it's an achievable one, from, as you say, from the point of view of... I don't know. I grew up in the '70s and there was a lot of doom-saying about the environment and population and so forth and it becomes more achievable now, but we shouldn't leave it all to the natural order of things. There can be disasters, there can be getting there quicker or getting there slower, so what should be... Where should our attention go in terms of doing things, in terms of taking action, both individually or collectively, what policies should we be imagining supporting to get there?
1:11:31 JW: So I am a little bit concerned that I may have been guilty of being a little bit too positive. And I want us to just recognize first off that nature is declining at terrifying rates at the moment.
1:11:43 SC: Extinctions is the... One simple thing.
1:11:46 JW: There's one aspect of this, but extinctions... Through my work I've witnessed everything from the last rhino in Vietnam disappearing to kind of the progenitors of domestic cattle have gone extinct in the wild. I'm seeing declines left, right and center. We're still damaging nature to incredible degrees, and there is, and I want to repeat this, there is no inevitability about what I've described. And so everything from policies on immigration, which was the point I was... We were gonna...
[overlapping conversation]
1:12:25 SC: Oh, right, immigration. Good, yeah.
1:12:29 JW: To the direct consumption of nature, there is quite the possibility that countries like Nigeria, who go through its developmental bottleneck, as we describe it in the paper, over the next generations and come out with no nature at the end of it.
1:12:43 SC: 'Cause it's a race, right? It's a race...
1:12:45 JW: Exactly.
1:12:45 SC: To get to this new equilibrium before you've destroyed everything.
1:12:47 JW: Yeah. So my country, England, we went through a very slow, actually, period of development, a small island, and came out and we basically destroyed it, much of it, which is why we love garden birds, and our biggest carnivore is a badger. Apart from being small. We did have bears, we did have wolves, we did have all these things, but we did it. America, the US went through its own process much more quickly, and we thought that was quick until we saw China's. And so... But what America managed to do is get much more of its natural estate through that bottleneck process, that squeeze on nature that helped drive that massive rapid transition of urbanization and wealth creation of those areas, and it came out of the other end with large chunks of nature left into it. And that's partly, yes, you're a big country, but also the speed of that process happened, and because you had people who cared enough to go and hold on, literally, just with their fingernails, hold on the pieces of land, pieces of water, and became the progenitors of the environmental movements.
1:13:50 JW: Now, this is what's happening in every single country, to some degree. It's happening in China now. People have this terrible view of China, of nobody caring in China, and yet I work with a large number of passionate Chinese nationals who look very, very similar to me, to those same people, the Muirs and the others of American environmental movement, and what...
1:14:13 SC: So there's a growing Chinese environmental movement?
1:14:16 JW: There's a very profound growing Chinese environmental movement. Now, of course, they come often from the brown, the pollution at the moment. The government is very, very scared and worried about the social movements being arranged around pollution; one of the reasons why they're actually doing quite a bit, and they're worrying about how to deal with pollution. But, so the inevitability argument we've gotta get out of the way. And so, getting to your question, there are clear things that we need to be able to do now on a different scales from the global response down to the individual response. The first one is not to get in the way of what's happening in many ways, and we can do this. And this actually does get to the immigration argument. The first one is that we should recognize that we have in many ways been winning many of these fights over the last few years, and one of the... A lot of the demographers point to these different scenarios, whereby that the world could just continue to go up past 12 billion and beyond, and actually, could also stabilize, at maybe nine, 10 billion, and then come down. Imagine a world where we actually ended up stabilizing at six or seven billion people. But all of those are subject to influences...
1:15:36 JW: And one of them is the freedom of people to move and immigration. And I don't come from this from an ideological perspective, and preconceived ideas about immigration in my culture, and what's happening to my culture. I come from this purely from looking at understanding demographers' work, and understanding that if we shut up short now, if we put up walls, if we prevent immigration now, not only has it got many of the features that people are talking about now, but essentially it will continue to drive up the world's human population. One of the...
1:16:10 SC: I'm sorry, how exactly does that work? Because we're not giving a release valve to countries that are in poverty?
1:16:16 JW: Because... That's partly the reason, partly the reason, because basically immigration helps the equilibrium. It's like any other pressure. You want people to move around, and people then forms equilibrium, and where there's demand, and people can support them, immigration moves in and people, and helps drive economies, and helps... And it's a positive thing all round. And of course, sometimes people are fleeing because of persecution, all those areas. Those people, when people are in war, or stress, people have more children. Why? Because they have less confidence that any of those children are gonna breathe. That's why we have baby boomers. That's why war actually has very little effect, in negative effect on human population. Because the long term...
1:17:01 SC: Make up for it more.
1:17:01 JW: Oh, absolutely. You make up for it more, because you've artificially created this scare of people to have more children, and that scare doesn't go down the day that war stops. And so population spikes happen after conflicts. So one of the things we should recognize is the world is having a lot less wars. And going back to the Steven Pinker-style argument, there's a lot less conflict than there was. Sure, too much, but anyway, and so...
1:17:24 SC: War is bad.
1:17:25 JW: War is bad.
1:17:25 JW: I have to say that, yes. We've got it out there. But we have a lot less war. And that is a phenomenally important aspect of all this. One of the only other regions to have increased human population increases is the Middle East. And so, we...
1:17:45 SC: A lot of war.
1:17:45 JW: A lot of war. And so if we can deal with immigration, if we can cope with it, and we can assimilate it, and it can remain a positive thing, it is the most significant way to, one of the most significant ways to bring about a world population stabilization. And that is ideologically very challenging to many.
1:18:03 SC: Yes, but it goes along with the overall philosophy that, let people make their choices, let the people make choices within countries, between countries, where to go, where to live. Some people will make bad choices but that increased freedom of letting people do their thing maybe paradoxically or maybe obviously helps the planet in some way.
1:18:25 JW: Yes. And so I have a very personal quandary, which... Challenge, which is, we work with a lot of very extremely poor people in rural areas in parts of the developing world. Our tradition has always been to immediately help them with their circumstances, there and then, and sometimes it can be fairly weak responses we can help them with. We help with maybe with chicken production or access to natural resource fish farming or... Because often our work is around natural resources and sustainability of them. It's no longer clear that's the best thing to actually help people with. And we have to really rethink this as a conservation organization.
1:19:05 SC: It might be to help them move, you mean or...
1:19:07 JW: It might be to help people move...
1:19:08 SC: Give them more choices.
1:19:08 JW: Give more options, definitely give them more options. And the other one is just give them more options and help them with the choice they want to make and just trust them that they have a better idea of their own... Of what's best for them rather, again, an ideological or institutional imperative. And so... The beginning... To your other question of what we need to be able to do, there's actually no question that the world needs to pay more attention and more support to Sub-Saharan Africa. And just because traditional development has not necessarily worked with, not necessarily that effective, it doesn't mean that we should not support and help, and it just needs to be different.
1:19:48 SC: And we can see things changing, as you said.
1:19:50 JW: Absolutely, we can see things changing. But unquestionably, the education of Sub-Saharan African girls is of paramount importance and those organizations that help get access to education, but also the ability for girls and women to be able to use and convert that education, it not only happens in the workplace and career-wise, but also in the home, and is a radically important intervention the world needs to be able to support a lot of these very, very good local grassroots indigenous efforts across Africa at the moment to be able to do, so that just needs to happen and we need to support that in any way we can. And that's me coming from an environmentalist, as a... Who worries about elephants and tigers. The other one for us is to make cities work. There are lots of cities around the world which are really not even getting close to optimal, they're terribly designed, they're really poorly designed, the government isn't paying half enough attention to them.
1:20:57 JW: Now... And yet we have unbelievable leadership in some of our, in US cities, in European cities, doing phenomenal things at the moment. I'm staggered, honestly, how encouraging it is to sometimes look at Copenhagen or look at even in New York or these areas and these initiatives that are carrying on. Of course, some of them don't work. That's okay, that's part of the experimentation and ideation and what's happening in these areas. Now, with these cities, which are wealthier than most nations, which are certainly more influential than most nations, can link up. Imagine what we can do linking New York to Lagos or one of these areas. And literally, help with the things that... With transport, with water, with municipal supplies, with waste and garbage, purely to make it more livable for the people of that country, purely to help them with that. That not only in and of itself is a good thing, the impacts and the influence that it has are enormous. And that to me is such an exciting and easy, not easy, but a conceptually easy thing to do.
1:22:03 SC: Yeah, it seems like a hard thing to be against.
1:22:06 JW: Yes.
1:22:07 SC: This is a great message. I like a little optimism sometimes. There's plenty of things to be not optimistic about.
1:22:15 JW: Absolutely. And I think... And I personally like Bloomberg's initiative on C40 in the cities initiative that ex-New York Mayor Bloomberg has, basically getting... As we see a resurgence of the city state, as I mentioned before, which is I think a fantastic thing. I think cities are definitely the way of the future in terms of also influence rather than federal governments. And he is helping this movement around these cities, taking the leadership and a lot of these roles, including climate change. And then we get down to conservation, as well, because again, this is still at the heart and the reason why this is... Why I'm involved in this is that during the '80s and '90s often protected areas in national parks became very unfashionable, they were seen as kind of a bit...
1:23:05 SC: Hippie.
1:23:06 JW: Western-imposed playgrounds and fortress conservation in all these areas. One of the weaknesses of... There was never again any narrative, what was the payoff? You just had these islands, lots of people are poor, we had these islands, and that was it. And then the wealthy could visit them and photograph them and that was nice. There was nothing for it, but now we have this, we have the evidence that across the world, these... If we are successful at getting these areas and species through this bottleneck, they are then not only gonna be just there in 100 years time, they're gonna start coming back, they're gonna start... They're gonna be the source site for a renaissance of nature, and the world, this is the exciting bit, the world... You can now start to envisage a world where a renaissance for nature actually happens. Where a recovery... We have more tigers in Texas, than we do in the wild, in the world.
1:24:01 JW: There's absolutely no reason to think that in 100 years, there might be 10 times the number of tigers there are now, funded for, supported by, advocated for, voted for, by the peoples of those countries, which historically have been too poor and disconnected, and it's seen as actually a negative to be able to have those. So our job now as environmentalists, as conservationists, is to get as much of nature through the bottleneck as possible and that will be the defining feature. The US managed to get the bison through its own bottleneck just...
1:24:37 SC: Just barely, yes.
1:24:38 JW: And now there are hundreds of thousands of...
1:24:40 SC: Mountain lions are...
1:24:40 JW: Mountain lions are coming back.
1:24:41 SC: We have here in LA, I don't know if you know, there's like a mountain lion that somehow got across the highway and is living in Griffith Park, and people are very excited.
1:24:49 JW: Excited and terrified at the same time.
1:24:50 SC: Well, they're careful, but they're excited, yeah.
1:24:53 JW: But we didn't get the passenger pigeon. The passenger became extinct. And you know what, the bison now, if those people who put them on the train and sent them to New York City over 100 years ago could see it now, they would cry with happiness at what we've achieved, and they'd hug us for what we've been able to do. The people, the passenger pigeon, we let it go, would curse us out. And so what our job is to be able to do is ensure that tigers, lions, great apes, these icons of nature, these great whales, can get through the bottleneck, not because this is the end point, because this is just the beginning. And so we have this terrifyingly exciting time over the next 50 years of actually this is the defining moment for nature.
1:25:36 SC: Right.
1:25:36 JW: This 50 years, not 1800s, not even 1950. It's now. Because we've now, India, I guarantee you, India is not gonna lose the tiger. I guarantee that. I could not guarantee you that if I was here 50 years ago.
1:25:54 SC: It's a very important point because it's saying that conserving this or that species isn't just a matter that we've fallen in love with this charismatic megafauna, that there's a specific period in history where doing this can really do good, can have a huge impact on the future of the entire ecosystem for the world.
1:26:11 JW: Absolutely. And so there's the globe... Coming back to your... We're imagining global climate change, there's the global climate change factor which is, if we lose the rest of the large intact forests of the world over the next 50 years, there ain't no way we're gonna hit our global climate change target. Now, forget technology and all those other ones at the moment, conserving these forests are the prerequisite to all the other strategies working in these areas. But if we lose the Congo Basin now, as it's about to go through its big demographic shift, then that has an effect on every single person in the world and our global ability to address climate change. And then on a completely different end of the spectrum, the idea that somehow these were just Western luxuries of us now has been proven demonstrably wrong, as culture after culture is starting now to value its own nature, appreciate it, and for the first time to be able, in many ways, to be able to put their hand up and say, "No, I want," whether it be Rwandans, "I want my mountain gorillas in Rwanda. And as a Rwandan I want these great whales in my country, and I'm actually gonna do something about it." So our job is not that... Once that happens, fantastic, I'm out of a job, and that's great. But my job is now, our job is now to, in those areas, get as much of nature through the bottleneck.
1:27:31 SC: So this is actually the good place to end, because as optimistic as the overall picture may be, there's work to be done. There's clearly things that we can do that will have an impact and we're not always doing them; we gotta try a little bit harder.
1:27:43 JW: Absolutely.
1:27:43 SC: All right. Joe Walston, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
1:27:45 JW: Thanks very much.
[music]
IMHO, your best podcast so far. (Second best — Alex Rosenfeld; also really liked Carlo Rovelli). Keep it up. You are appreciated.
Such clear exposition of such exciting new ideas. Listening to this should make you feel more optimistic about our world today. I will be requiring my students to listen carefully to this message.
Hi Sean
I have question for Joe Walston. I was so happy hear everything he explained, and when I discussed his ideas of urbanization, and the current bottleneck in conservation to our biologist daughter Ali, she said that his argument does not address the problem of genetic diversity within species. Ali said that even if we see a number of individuals within a species survive, the decline of the gene pool within that species, due to loss of numbers, will make it very difficult for them to remain adaptable in the way that life demands. Unless every threat to plants and animals is reduced to zero, now, today, immediately, the different species will not have enough genetic variability to adapt and flourish within their ecosystems, and will become weak and susceptible to disease and climate change and pathogens.
It would be great if you could address this issue one day in your Mindscape Podcast. Joe’s message generally was one of the most positive ones I have heard in a long time and I want to be able to send his optimistic overview to the younger people who are struggling so hard for answers right now.
ps your podcast is already fantastic!!
thank you, from a fan