Hope Jahren with Barbara Kingsolver

good evening virtual audience and welcome thank you so much for joining us tonight my name is kate bruns and on behalf of harvard bookstore the harvard university division of science and the cabot science library i am so excited to welcome you to this event with hope jaren presenting her new book the story of more how we got to climate change and where to go from here in conversation with barbara kingsolver tonight's event is the latest installment in our harvard science book talk series we are so excited to continue the work of bringing the authors of recently published science-related literature to our community during these unprecedented times we have three exciting science book talks planned for this september to learn about them when they are officially announced you can sign up for the bookstore's email newsletter at harvard.com or you can check out the page harvard.com events science for more info we also have a science research public lecture series youtube page where you can see any previous talks that you might have missed this evening's event is going to conclude with some time for your questions if you would like to ask hope or barb or something please go to the q a chat at the bottom of the screen where you can submit your question we're going to get through as many as time allows for this evening also once the event begins i'm going to post a link in the chat to purchase tonight's featured book the story of more all sales through this link support harvard bookstore so a huge thank you for your support your purchases and your financial contributions there will also be a donate link in the chat make this virtual author series possible and now more than ever support the future of a landmark independent bookstore thank you to our partners at harvard university and thank you to all of you for tuning in and showing up for authors publishers indie book selling and especially for science because it really matters and finally as you might have experienced in virtual gatherings these last few weeks technical issues can arise if they do we'll do our best to resolve them quickly thank you for your patience and your understanding so now i am very honored to introduce tonight's speakers award-winning geobiologist hope jaren has taught completed research and built labs at the georgia institute of technology johns hopkins university the university of hawaii in honolulu where she was a tenured professor and now at the university of oslo norway where she holds the jay tuzo wilson professorship the author of more than 70 scientific studies and an outspoken critic of sexism and science she is the only woman to have been awarded both of the young investigator medals given within the earth sciences and if you're watching tonight it's likely that you've also heard of or read her fantastic best-selling memoir lab girl praised by the new york times and patchett and barack obama alike hope will be joined on screen tonight by celebrated author barbara kingsolver whose 15 beloved books include unsheltered animal vegetable miracle the poison wood bible and a new poetry collection how to fly out this september in 2000 she was awarded the national humanities medal our country's highest honor for service through the arts her background though is in biology before writing she worked as a scientist too and therefore i can't think of a better pairing for tonight's event where they'll be discussing hope's new book the story of more an illuminating book on global warming that takes us on a journey across time and space outlining thoughts and beliefs from mesopotamia to hope's tiny minnesota hometown elizabeth colbert praises the book saying hope jaren asks the central question of our time how can we learn to live on a finite planet the story of more is thoughtful informative and above all essential we are so pleased to have them both with us virtually tonight so without further ado the digital podium is yours hope and barbara thank you so much it's really a joy to be here tonight um it's night for me i'm in oslo norway it's it's the middle of the night but it's still light out next to me on your screen is barbara king solver um it's it's wonderful to e-meet her as i did today and i'm looking forward to hearing what she has to say and and what you have to say in in terms of your your questions but mostly what you have to say um i am really excited to be here with you hope and i um i loved lab girl so much that i jumped for joy when um i got a galley of the story of moore and i love the story of moore and it's um as kate said it's a it's a timely book it's an essential book it's also a beautifully written book and it's funny um which nobody else has managed in a book about climate change so um i'm so i'm just so happy that this book is in the world and um uh excited to get um to get to help other people know about it and maybe we could start by um uh hearing from you a little bit about how this book came to be you say in the first chapter that it grew the book grew out of a uh class on climate change that you taught for many years under orders from your department chair it wasn't your idea evidently um but you did it and i'm sure you did it well i have a feeling this was a wildly popular class because the book is so good you have to be a great teacher um but that's a big that's a big leap from teaching to writing um i can see how a person would want to make that leap because you have the option of reaching you know instead of 50 people in a classroom you know 50 000 people in the world or something so sure lots of people would like to make that leap but you did it um how did you do it what was your process um what what moved you to do this um you know it's i always feel i feel almost guilty for for admitting it but i write for really selfish reasons i write because it gives me a lot of joy to sit at my desk and play with words and try to you know there's this thing you want to say and it it exists it's a formless idea you know it's an existential thing and then you've got this language you know you've got this spattering of words and phrases and stuff you can make up or whatever and and so how do you take the one and as as well as possible embody the other right so it's just like this little puzzle or something that you that you solve with each phrase or whatever i just love to sit and do that and spend my days doing that do right you're translating something abstract in your in your mind into into language right yeah yeah exactly so so and i just love to spend my days that way i always feel like i'm getting away with something when i get to spend my hours that day so so i write all my books for for all my books my books for for for uh selfish reasons um primarily because you know if you if you write something you don't know if especially with labral you write something you don't know if it's going to get published it gets published you don't you don't know if anybody's going to buy it if they buy it you don't know if they're going to read it if they read it you don't know if you're going to like it so you better do it for yourself you better do it so that you can say you know i i did this this is something that i had in my life and so so so lab girl was really about me making sense of my own life it was a selfish exercise and you know i'd live at all these places and i knew these weird people and i've done this stuff and figured out some things and none of it really made much sense it was just this weird jumble of stuff and then i wrote it down and all of a sudden it was just my life was a story with a beginning and a middle and you know sort of an end and i i used it to make sense of my life and i thought well if that's what i get out of it that's a lot and then it turned out that people wanted to read it you know and enjoyed it and and you know things got crazy and then so i decided not now what you know now now what so i'm a scientist so what does that mean basically all that means is that i've spent a lot of years doing stuff that people in other walks of life haven't right so i've walked down this path where i've learned to read papers and i wanted to do experiments and i've learned you know how to statistically test outcomes and all this kind of stuff and people that have walked down the path of being a nurse or becoming a dentist or driving a truck of farm equipment you know they haven't walked that path so so okay so i spent 25 years walking that path what did i get out of it what what what is the most important thing i really have to say to somebody that i got out of this path you know this has to mean more than me just keeping busy for for 25 years on on this you know on this path or staying on youtube managing to stay on the path and not fall off of it or whatever so the story of more was really about me making sense of my time um it was about making sense of what what does it mean to be alive on the earth right now what does my training and the path i've walked tell me particularly about what it means to exist at this particular crossroads in human history and it also came out the same time i turned 50 right so that's kind of this nice chunk of time of your half century how have things changed over the decades of my life what what what does it mean for me to have been alive during these decades right now and that's the question i answered for myself again as a selfish exercise and it became the story of more i would argue that it was um much more than a selfish exercise um is a very honest exercise and very helpful to a whole lot of people beyond yourself there's no subject that's more important for all of us to know more about right now than than this one that you've covered in the story of more and um i'm just going to say you may not realize this but you're a really special scientist i've spent a lot of time around scientists when i went to graduate school most of my professors if you ask them a question would turn around and answer by writing an equation on the blackboard well in good for the handful of people who know that language most of the people in the world don't read that language and i also discovered in graduate school that there are few people a very few special people who could answer those same questions in the english language and i figured out a couple of things one is that if you understand a subject really really well you can explain no matter what it is you can explain it in language which is something you do um another thing i figured out is that most scientists don't really necessarily want to do that to explain in language that everybody can understand which is what you do so beautifully um i'm wondering do you think we have a cultural problem in science i mean we're we're we've reached this crisis where a lot of people aren't listening to scientists have just kind of written off science and it's easy to blame you know the non-listeners but what what credit for that problem do we share as scientists do you think um if we can't talk across the divide if we can't work hard enough to to try to make these big concepts more comprehensible yeah i i mean i've done both right so i've so i've written a lot of papers in this coded language that you know you go to grad school to learn and then you become proficient at it and you know you talk about things in in the third person and you always use the passive tense and all this kind of stuff and um i've also written now books with dialogue in them i mean that's one reason i wanted to write you there's certain things you never get to write in science and number one you never get to be funny ever even if you're a funny person which i which i which i like to think i am and you never ever get to write dialogue right so so there are fundamental structural differences in these kinds of writing but i can say after having done a fair bit of both it's much much harder to write for the public than it is to write in the rarified atmosphere of your own expertise it becomes you know there's a formula you stick to it you build on what you know when you talk about something and explain it and start from a shared place you begin again you know you make it's like butter you have to make it every day because it doesn't keep you know so you you start from if you say i'm going to explain this and this was one of the challenges i gave myself you know i'm going to explain this really important thing that has given me so much joy and has has has made me grow as a person i've spent so many hours on i'm going to share it with you using only words that we both use on a daily basis right so that's the challenge is how much of that can i embody without falling back on this you know rarefied code that shortcuts and and excises you know all the joy and all the uncertainty and all and all that failure and all these kinds of things um what if i it's you know it's a challenge to write like that and it's also you know and you've got a lot of other balls to keep in the air you've got to keep somebody's interest you've got to convince them that something so far outside their experience is important you've got to put them in a place where they're ready to hear something new um you've got to use to convince them that you respect them and that you believe that they can understand what you're trying to say i mean i look at a lot of science writing and i think that that's the key thing that's really really missing is uh respect for the reader exactly re respect and some some com some empathy uh some theory of mind some empathy for where that uh where that person is is coming from and what they care about rather than just assuming that they care um i would also uh ask you do you find there are costs i mean because we really have two cultures you know we have science and we have the arts and very few people cross over i've found in my life as a person who as a bat you know who's neither burden or mammal or kind of both i i'll just say for example when i was um being interviewed for grad school by by a committee i had my resume and you know my my little resume had some publications and some of them were poems i had published a few poems when i was you know 24 or whatever and the the head of my committee said i see there's some poetry on here and i said yes sir and he said there won't be any more of that and i said oh no sir all right and i would like to think that things have changed since the 80s but i have a feeling that that that that problem still might exist that you may be taken less seriously as a scientist or or something or or there may be uh wires crossed when you are when you do start to get known for being someone who is communicating well with the public it's like you're airing the laundry or something i don't know do you do you find that yeah i mean if people want to write you off they're going to write you off um and they're going to find a reason why that's the right thing to do um i don't know i i think at the root of that a science is actually very invested in believing that science is a very hard thing that not everyone can do right um even as and i say that to my colleagues sometimes it's like do you really want to live in a world where everybody can do science right i mean so everybody can hum a tune right everybody can sing a song is that part of the reason why if you're an aspiring singer and you train at juilliard and everything like that you can't expect to make a living wage working 80 hours a week right i mean so we assign value to different skills and for whatever reason your scientific training gives you skills that are assigned a very high value and so there's there the science does have a vested interest in in uh safeguarding access to to that language to that coded language and if everybody understood that stuff would would it be so hard and valuable and necessary and employable and stuff and language is the key to sharing it to breaking that rule and the problem with that that notion of exclusivity that i've seen over that i saw in my career as a scientist beginning in the mid 80s and and continuing is that people stopped funding science and that's that's the drawback i mean in the us funding for especially basic science um really plummeted um and that's the cost if you're not willing to let people really know what you're doing and the beauty of what you're doing and the wonder of what you're doing as a scientist they're not going to foot the bill um so so anyway so i think i think all i think all anybody and everybody who can make science more accessible to the broader public is doing us all an enormous public service and um and i think that um another another value of what of this book and what and and your previous book is that you also make scientists accessible you sort of you you do a great job of explaining what a scientist really does and is and what what science is which a lot of people don't even know um so in your in let's talk about writing because i think um you were i keep thinking about how you were saying you write writing is a selfish act and i'm just not going to let you get away with that i would say it's an honest act if you write from the the exact point in the universe where you are without thinking too much about who's gonna like this um that's a that's probably the most honest and most valuable starting point for a writer because you have something quite specific to say and you'll get there by sticking by by closing the door and not letting other people in the room so i think that it's um i think that it's wonderful and i think some of your writing gifts are um very much very similar to um the tools that that i use as a novelist you use a lot of metaphor and i think you even say in the book at one point um as a teacher the best way to explain something is to put it is is metaphorical i can't remember exactly how you said it but if you if you if you make an analogy to something that that students understand so you do that beautifully you use dialogue and you and your language is so lyrical um i i just i really want people to know how beautiful this book is and so i'm gonna ask you if you would read um this one of my favorite one of my many favorite passages of the book um is describing the the panthalasa c um starting on page on page 100 would you read us that yeah there was a time there was a broad and fathomless ocean beneath the waves swirled the currents that flushed salt water in magnificent gushes deep in the dense cold darkness the seafloor waited with perfect patience to embrace the corpse of every living thing above this was called the pantalasa sea and i am certain that the creatures swimming in it believed their watery world to be the entire universe extending forever in every direction the creatures of the panthelasa were different from the ones that we recognize in our oceans jawless fishes arrived in great schools their wormy bodies streaming behind them as they searched for places to attach innumerable cartilage forms swam forever in motion their gill slits pumping as they moved spiral shelled squids jetted back and forth contracting and squirting their way along sea lily swayed tethered to the bottom by their roots their animal petals filter feeding on the small and weak that floated by so beautiful and this is the story of moore this is where it started because this turns out to be petroleum where uh where we get coal and petroleum and and gas and uh natural gas and you you made that really clear in this vivid visual way that i had never really thought about before i never really yeah you know when you put gas in your car that's that's it's plants it's animals yeah it's it's a true true story i mean yeah there was this ocean and it's today um located well one of these oceans is located where the middle east is now and all this alive stuff was dead and then it was compressed and now it's the vast oil reserves of the middle east the fact that oil isn't everywhere is because there weren't oceans everywhere there were different things some places there were forests and those forests are now where we find coal yeah it's just yeah it's it's it's um it's beautiful um and another thing i really love about the book is how engaging it is um you begin each chapter with uh some a personal story a story about your family or um or some event in your childhood or your your best friend when you were six years old which was a piece of ice named covington um this is such a great strategy yeah for a book that's about let's face it a lot of stuff that we kind of don't want to hear about but this is i mean it's a trick of the trade i mean i i use it in fiction as well if you can get the reader on board you can take them places that they didn't think they wanted to go and then in the end they say oh wow i'm glad i went there and um you do that by doing this very um unexpected thing for a scientist which is you you're so friendly you become you become our friend which is so valuable because nobody learns anything from being talked at or lectured we take information and sociologists have proven this over and over we accept information from sources we trust that's it only and you become this trustworthy friend in the book um how is it that you are a cracker jack scientist and also able to do this thing where you write in this very um compassionate and empathetic and friendly way i mean maybe that's a weird question but um do you have any insights on that that that you feel are relevant to your writing um a lot of it goes back to my father my father was a community college teacher he taught all the sciences at a rural community college in minnesota for 42 years consecutive years so he taught and taught and taught and he was always that guy you know he was always that teacher and so when i was little you know it was i hung out in his lab and he taught me stuff and stuff like that and so um i think picking up that you know you learn best when you're in an environment where you feel safe and calm and relaxed and like the person who is telling you something likes you and believes that you're good inside and believes that you're capable of learning whatever it is they're telling you and believes that um uh you will get and and is doing it just to share a moment of joy is sharing something joyful with you that they hope will be a joy in your own life you know this very um that's what it is to me and that's and that's something i learned long before i started going to school and something i kept with me as that's what real science is that's what real learning is that's what real explaining science is it's it's a story you tell somebody you really like and you're so proud when they get it you know the only thing better than getting it yourself is when you see that the person you just talked to also gets it you know it's just and and he gave me that and i i it's it's just it's what i have to give so well it shows it shows and you and you give it very well and i can see that that's that's the same with teaching as with writing uh the difference of course is when you write a book you don't get to see that moment you know of the reader's comprehension but i always feel like um the art is only complete i mean when i write a book it's half done it's finished when someone reads it and gets it and so yeah that that connection is is so crucial we're there um so i'm going to say that this i found lots of surprises in this book there are um there are there are a lot of data about a lot of things all of them um rendered in in interesting ways i went into this thinking i you know i understood this material pretty well and there were still so many things that blew me away um just stunned me about the story of more how much we use our patterns of use our patterns of sort of blowing everything we want into an extra order of magnitude if we possibly can so i'm going to ask you what when you were doing this research what surprised you the most well you know what the the the same numbers kept popping up i'd say that's the first thing is that um you know and i even put a catechism in the back because once you know numbers you can really you can really say something you know you're not just in the realm of arguing right so population has doubled since in your lifetime yeah in 19 since 1969 if you learn nothing else from the book you will learn that was born in 1969 population has doubled but almost everything else has tripled food production has tripled grain production has tripled meat production has tripled electricity production has quadrupled oil usage has tripled um some things are off the charts sugar production has quadrupled plastic production has increased by 10 times but this this several times more than this huge population growth which we're generally aware of was out matched by the production of so many tangible goods and of course services right leading into waste leading to massive amounts of waste because it was extremely poorly distributed across this um configuration right so um that was the other so so that was something that kept coming up and kept coming up and i said you know this is really the story of the book it's a story of more and this is the shape of the more and this is what i want to communicate but i think the night that and i love to sit at my desk and do this and you know even even static statistics that aren't you know very sunny you know yeah mortality rates and stuff like that i you know i enjoy looking for patterns and data etc but there was one night where i was just like i usually go home and i keep talking about it i can't stop talking about i go back to my computer or whatever and there was one night and this rarely happens where i just pushed back my chair from my desk and said you know i i'm gonna walk home i'm not gonna take the train i can't i just i can't i can't and it was the day when i figured out that the amount of food that is wasted within um the richer countries of the world is calorically equal to the amount of food needed to bring everyone on the globe up from undernourished or malnourished to a life-sustaining amount so the amount that we waste on one side of the planet is enough to uh feed everyone who suffers on other parts of the planet right so um so it became very clear to me that you know all of the all of the want and suffering really in the world is due to not the earth's inability to provide but it's because of our inability to share and that's i think that's to me that was a huge moment of learning and and i had to i had to go home and think and say what now you know so so if i say that like that what do you say next what do you say next well what you did say was remarkable i mean i think it's one of the most remarkable sentences of the book because you said you uh let me get it exactly right you're not sure whether to feel more depressed or hopeful about that that's such a good point because there is so much hope in understanding that we don't have a production problem we have a distribution problem and if i can click on my computer and order a pair of shoes or a coffee maker and like 15 minutes later i swear i hear the ups drive you know truck coming up my driveway we can solve a distribution problem um some of the some of the most beautiful parts of this book for me were that clarity about how soluble these problems are solvable i guess i should say these problems really are if we just think outside of our sort of our our hamster wheels of trying and trying to make more and more um and by the end of the book i mean about eighty percent of the book i think eighty-five percent of the book is a as a very lovely story of what is and how we got here and then the last ten to fifteen percent of the book is like what next what could be done um and what really has to be done pronto because we're just at this moment when we don't we have to do a lot of things really quickly but they're very doable this i ended i finished this book feeling really hopeful um even despite all the scary information here you still sound so so positive so hopeful can you tell us why that is and how that is because we really really need that right now yeah i mean it also comes from examining the numbers you know um uh you know sometimes within the mechanism of the problem is the process of the solution right i mean these these things that are causing all these problems were things that we somehow lived mostly without even 20 years ago right so so it's not so this has happened so fast it's not inconceivable to imagine a world without them um right now is uh you know covet is a terrible disease we all hate it and wish it had never come but it's teaching us things you know it's teaching us that we don't all have to be in the same room all the time from all the four corners of the earth in order to transact every interaction and learning and business and whatever you know we are learning that a lot of the things we're so locked into doing traveling and shopping and eating and you know the way we spend our time and our resources those a lot of them turned out to be optional on a very basic level while you are in oslo i'm in southwestern virginia and our viewers are everywhere and look it's working i think i hope yeah yeah so it's yeah and you you know what hope is a hope is something it's it's an existential i don't know if it's a feeling or an attitude or whatever but i don't know if it can be explained in rational terms it's not probability it's not you know if you study every night for a semester the probability you'll get an a is high hope is not like that it doesn't work according to the probabilities and so trying to explain it in rational terms trying to argue for it in rational terms is possibly not worth doing i mean the best i can explain to it is that i was taught that love is a gift but hope is a duty and we if we are able to hope for something then we are obliged to work for it i mean one thing i also say in my book is that you know being hopeful requires courage and um it takes the most courage to you know not criticize institutions or policies and things like that it takes the most courage to to look at your own life and to take stock of where you use energy where you don't what you buy what you need how you could be different how you couldn't be different how you invest all those kinds of things um we have to ask ourselves that about our own lives because listen nobody's ever going to ask on our behalf you know i've been a scientist for 25 years i've worked with environmental scientists calling for policy change demanding policy change begging for policy change i haven't seen any of that policy change people tell me that your own your own actions won't make a difference until we have policy change well i'm not ready to wait any longer for these magical policy changes i'm ready to to look at my own life and to ask you humbly and to give you the tools to look at yours and to tell me what you see because every great change in history has begun at the personal level whether it was the abolition of slavery or uh women getting the vote um the women didn't wait around to get the vote and you say in your book i just i just kind of like we can't change policy if we can't change ourselves and and if if we can change ourselves we and we can show ourselves and our neighbors and other people look i can have a happy life while using 40 less energy or something that spreads right that's contagious it gives it it creates more courage i think um i think um the resistance to climate change is very fear driven and i think personal changes are a good antidote to that fear um yeah and i don't know what the best change for you is you know if i teach you newtonian mechanics if i teach you you know f equals m a i don't i don't know whether you're going to use that knowledge to build a bridge or to build a weapon right it's it's not i have to trust that if i give you those tools as effectively and as honestly as i can you will do the soul searching to discover how to make those tools work best for you and to support the things that you love but my job as a teacher ends after giving you the best information i possibly can because and especially you know i hope this book goes to young people because they they understand the world that they're growing into far better than i do but i do want them to know how we got here and how and how much i respect how much they care and how hard i tried to write it as a story that anybody can have you know you don't you don't have to take my class you don't have to enroll in the university you don't have to learn this code you can you can just have it i wrote it down i did my best here it is it's for you i hope you like it you will you will i think it's a great great time to open the floor to questions wonderful i am so happy to turn it over to questions um we've received quite a few uh let's see um i'd like to start with a question from nell scoville who asks we talk about funny people people are funny she's she's professionally funny she writes she she writes for do you remember the wonderful wonderful reboot of the muppets that came out she writes those jokes what a wonderful thing well thank you for watching now and she has a question uh for you both uh this is a great one do you think the pandemic has given the world an opportunity to disrupt rampant consumption and remake consumerism an opportunity undoubtedly what comes next is the question like does it stick what do what do you think oh hope yeah i mean people are suffering and dying it's a terrible thing it's not like there's a it's not like there's a silver lining or something along those ways i i think it has taught us something about the things we thought were necessary that turned out to be optional i think for the first time in a generation we slowed down we stepped back and we lived without and and now we're a people who knows that they can do that if they have to and i do think that will change everything i i agree with you um i have read about um the sacrifices that american people made during world war ii which were enormous there were no nobody bought a new car for for four years or something like that no there was no gas gasoline was rash and sugar was rationed butter was rationed people lived without meat and they turned in their hair pins for the you know for the metal drives and i remember reading all this and thinking those days are over americans will never ever the americans i know will never make that kind of sacrifice for the for for the public good and you know what i was wrong because that's what we're doing i mean we feel like we're protecting ourselves but we're also doing all of we're making serious sacrifices sometimes enormous ones giving up jobs and child care and all kinds of really difficult things doing really hard things mostly to protect older people uh people with with um with fragile health we're doing it for hospitals to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed we're doing this for the for the civic good and i'm so proud of us and i'm amazed and i'm i'm i'm impressed and like you hope i think this means something we've seen ourselves do something uh do something hard we are capable of continuing to do hard things for the greater good of of of of trying to to put to address climate change there's a related question about the pandemic um given the large amount of data that you've analyzed and have access to have you been able to look at if it's changed over the past few months during the pandemic in other words is it having an effect on the environment yeah right um yeah right so so the so yeah so we've all been living differently and and there are some noticeable effects so so the big one is um if you look at plane travel if you look at the amount of of plane travel that's happened all over the world plane travel is hands down the most fuel inefficient i mean aside from blasting in a rocket ship or something i think in a plane you get you get it's on the order of feet per gallon you know the mileage that you get when you're in a plane and a couple a couple months of um really decreased uh plane travel was enough to kind of level off uh pco2 rise so the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere was enough to level it off um i think it was um march uh or april and it was kind of in a month we hadn't seen it before um and then it did continue to go up um the the difficult part of that question the difficult part of answering that question as well as i'd like to is that the feedbacks associated with making a change making that blip are are long right um are we going to see [Applause] you know turning the ship around is going to take a lot more than a blimp right um i think i think there's a lot of glory to be gained from writing those papers uh i think within a year you're gonna see more and more papers published to that effect um you know what is the you know what is the effect on armadillo populations in texas with less people commuting on the highway and splattering them all over the roads you know i mean there's just so many ricochet effects that are coming off of how we've changed our behavior um good gear for armadillos yeah i mean yeah exactly so so they're a student uh scientists see this as a disruption and they see it as an unusual opportunity to measure things um that's not the answer i'd like to give you like a like a hard and cold answer about yes this much happened and it's doing this much the only one thing i will add to that is that we are in a crisis when the united states is in a crisis is that data being collected because the um institutions like the epa a lot of the monitoring institutions have suffered a great deal of basically dismantling um a lot of the reports and things that i use to write this book are no longer generated or no longer requested or assigned under this administration so we hopefully will be able to figure out but we do need the consistency of that data collection in order to do it um what do i think i do think it is the sustained i do think if we if covet 19 causes a new normal and that normal can persist for five years or a decade and it is a different energy usage i do think we will begin to see climate effects of that but but just a two-month blip that's a pretty tall order that's opinion that was a long answer to a short question professor it's a good answer though yeah uh let's see this customer asks this is interesting what differences do you see in consumerism and consumption living in oslo what can americans learn from them do you live in oslo yeah yes yeah yeah um uh yeah i get a lot of questions about norway how norway has handled coved how norway handles everything the most important thing to remember about norway is it's five million people so it's a country with a population the size of metropolitan atlanta so the things that we do here it's much easier to motivate and organize five million people than it is to um motivate a much more heterogeneous country three million three hundred million plus that you have in the us right but that being said um yeah consumer you know so so covid was this thing and i think we first found out about it somehow march 3rd or so it seemed like it was in italy or denmark and and march 12th we found out at four o'clock the university was closing and we had to be out of there at six and we had to be in our homes and my kid found out he would not have school the next day that thursday i don't remember if it was the day before or day after we were sent home to our homes and we were told only to go out to go to the pharmacy or go to the grocery store and it was like that for many many weeks many weeks so there was almost no consumption during that period um and it really hasn't picked up since then i don't know if that's exactly what the question was about consumption patterns over here yeah yeah probably in general probably pre-code pre-coded or curious in general there's less consumption because things are so expensive i mean relative to your paycheck you know you would never go out and buy a package of 15 pork chops you know like or standardly you know you find at costco or whatever because you know pork chops are eight bucks each or something like that right so the the cost of things relative to um your wage is much higher so you don't acquire as many things um but you don't pay for as many services so you don't pay tuition and you don't pay health insurance and you don't pay et cetera et cetera so it it's an interesting it's an interesting way to organize a country an anonymous attendee says how do you think that beauty and joy and love as found in both of your books counter climate change fear i think that fear and guilt can trigger inaction just as often as they can action so i'm very interested in the positive side of motivation for change well barbara is is a uh is a is a virtuosa at writing about about love and joy and and things like that so i'm gonna let her take a stab at that one first well i i was gonna throw it to you because um here we are um because you said something you wrote in your book that your use of my my uh my goal is to in um inform and not scare you because teach something i'm paraphrasing teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference um i i so agree with that frightening people um gets us nowhere um i think that um one of the one of the great values of art of any kind of art whether it's whether it's it's visual art or music or uh but i can speak specifically to fiction is that we can um we can we can in engage with with a reader we can gain trust and cr as we were saying before we can sort of create this common ground um and and it's just what you were saying hope earlier about teaching when you create a create an environment in a classroom as your as your father did of sort of relaxation and joy and trust then then the music starts to happen the art starts to happen the science starts to happen the communication starts to happen i think um the real tragedy of the polarized climate of of my country of where i'm living right now is that we're all so fixed on being right and the other piece of person being wrong that any conversation begins with you idiot and then the conversation is over because nobody's going to listen anymore and something that we can do through art and i mean probably many people i mean this translates to many other professions if we can begin the conversation with um breaking bread with um once upon a time with here tell me about yourself with here's something that you and i share we can go from there into the the areas where we may not agree but we may learn from each other but it has to begin it has to you have to invite someone in with something good you don't invite anyone in with a sign on your door that says either this is terrifying or you're really stupid i mean nobody's gonna come in the door i i i also think you know this is this is the price of admission right i mean every generation is is is fated to struggle with the specter of their own armageddon right or their own annihilation right and this is ours you know i mean i if you think of the great plagues of the past that people didn't understand and and caused so much hardship and and you think of how close we came to nuclear annihilation and you think of of the looming um famine associated with the the population boom of the 1950s and 60s and and there's you know there's a component of it that is about keeping the faith about about accepting that as part of the part of the entrance fee to having to taking a turn on the planet as a person and that eventually solutions came to all those great ills and it was too late for many people but it wasn't too late for all you know and so um it's it's uh we get to be we get to be part of it and it isn't it supposed to be easy i guess i i you know i'm supposed to be a scientist but you hear me going back to you know my spiritual position or my existential position or my you know how i view life what is life for what am i for what what am i trying to get out of this and um just like you know the greek gods have to struggle with their insufficiencies and curses and they brought it on themselves and they tried to avoid it but they couldn't and and yet there was always somebody left at the end of it to tell another set of stories and i think i think some of this is is is the all part of the pain and the joy that is comes with the ticket it comes comes with the price of admission seen as it's six here i think we have time for one more question and maybe some final comments um let's see i'm gonna go with this one from rebecca goguin uh as two amazing storytellers what advice would you give to the rest of us to help shape people's mindset on the distribution problem how can we encourage people to want to make more of less and this ties on to what i think you're you're both saying just now it really does um i think i think in a in a sort of consumer and driven society um we have in the grain this fear of missing out fear of not having something that everybody else does i mean good lord it starts in middle school right um of not having the thing that will make you happy and this is just we're really we really get brainwashed this way living in you know in a in a consumer culture but i think there are beautiful examples um of of the reverse of that and i see them i mean i take a lot of um of um of of faith and and strength from my younger friends my millennial friends people who have really made a life of of enjoying and enjoying less rather than more and i think for me a great example of this is the local food movement that i have gotten kind of deeply embedded in when we figured out that eating locally and eating in season means you're actually eating much better than you know than when you're just being force-fed by the industrial pipeline that actually a tomato a ripe august tomato is such a happier thing than this horrible thing that you get from the grocery store in january that spent half of its all of its life in the boxcar you there it's if you slow down you know the slow food movement is is um is a great starting point for how to inspire people with um the beauty of of smaller and slower and uh quality over quantity i think that the um the pandemic uh in which we're living right now is a really great opportunity to to explore this i think that a lot of people are learning to cook maybe for the first time um having conversations with their children um and again as hope said we're you know this is not to say anyone asked for this but it's an opportunity to understand how i mean i'm i'm sitting here in my in my office right in my house right now talking to you and enjoying this forum that i would not have done if i had been required to fly to to um to boston or to wherever for it i just wouldn't have so this is there are great opportunities in retooling and and um scaling back uh i think that living being creative and finding these opportunities and living them and sharing them with our neighbors is is a great way to do that what do you think hope i i think about yeah i i well yes but i think about i without i do a lot of gardening because i can't get into my lab and i can't grow plants and kill plants in there so i'm doing it at my yard so i was in my this in my yard and i've got this thing and it's not really a plant it's not really a bush it's just one of these volunteer things and i'm thinking about digging it up and my neighbor comes over you know i'm dealing with norwegian vegetation and stuff he comes over he says you know you don't have to dig at that thing all the time you just have to not water it for a few years and it'll go and it'll go away right just put a plastic thing on it make sure it doesn't get any water it'll go away by itself and and so i always think about you know money is like that you know you're you're watering things when you spend money so if you want something to go away you can just kind of stop watering it right and i tell that to my students a lot because you know they don't they don't have a lot of money or whatever but they walk they walk around and they buy you know a latte they buy stuff on the street or whatever and and um they you know which place are you going to buy the latte at which which you know what can you find out how they treat their employees can you you know these kinds of things and i try to instill into them that these are choices like you make that your consumption is actually the sum total of hundreds of little choices that you make all day and that the first part of knowing where the big changes are is to kind of take stock of where all your small transactions are going you know and that's that's what i like to talk about i don't i don't want to tell people what to buy or not buy or eat or not eat or you know this kind of thing but um if you stop wait but there's just something to that and i haven't quite figured it out yet but if you don't sometimes all you have to do is just not water it and it'll die it'll stop growing you don't have to dig it out you just have to stop watering it does money work that way absolutely well i think that's all the time we have but i think that's a great ending note for this conversation um i would like to thank you both so much for being here in the virtual cyber space and for having this wonderful conversation tonight um thank you for all of you out there who are attending it looks like there's 350 of you at least feel free to learn more about this important book and purchase the story of more on harvard.com right there on behalf of harvard bookstore the harvard division of science and the cabot science library all here in cambridge massachusetts have a wonderful night please keep reading and please be well thank you everyone bye

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Length: 66min 54sec (4014 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020