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Rinsing and Repeating Our Way to Climate Disaster? Is There a Better Way? · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Speaker 3: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 3: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Speaker 3: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: Geopolitics,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: disruptive tech,
• 0:17
  Speaker 3: mass migration, the changing climate,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: culture wars,
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  Speaker 3: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  Speaker 3: and that you join the conversation at telbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  Speaker 3: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: World.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: We humans are a land-based species.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Sure, we fly from place to place and travel across the oceans, but we live on land.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's why humanity has made such a mess of the oceans, which after all, comprise seventy percent of the Earth's surface.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: The oceans are warming and becoming more acidic at an accelerating pace.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: The large-scale currents that regulate climate on the planet are being altered with dramatic consequences.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Plastics and other toxins are dumped or spilled in vast quantities, and there seems to be a real risk that deep sea mining is set to explode as nations compete to exploit more of the minerals that make modern life well modern.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: The tragedy is that it's in nineteen ninety-five when the United Nations first challenged the countries of the world to do something about the global environment.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Things have gotten worse, not better.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: But humans like to rinse and repeat, so COP Thirty, as it's called, will convene next month in the Brazilian Amazon of all places for yet another round of diplomacy that I'm going to bet won't produce anything more consequential than COP Twenty-nine or COP Twenty-eight or COP Twenty-seven and so on.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Can we do better or are we self-condemned to slip side our way into something that certainly seems like it could be a global disaster?
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: But I'm hoping that Linwood Pendleton can point us in a positive direction.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Linwood is founding executive director of the Ocean Knowledge Network.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Linwood, to new thinking for a new world.
• 2:10
  Speaker 0: Thanks, Ellen.
• 2:11
  Speaker 0: It's great to be here.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Linwood, let me start with an apology.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: I struggled to figure out how to describe you.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: You're an economist, a biologist, a social entrepreneur who builds networks and experienced government official and academic, a mentor to indigenous experts, and all of that based on deep knowledge and interest in the oceans.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Help me here.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Who are you?
• 2:33
  Speaker 0: I'm someone who learns by experience.
• 2:38
  Speaker 0: And so I really like to do new things.
• 2:42
  Speaker 0: Lex kind of explains my CV, I suppose.
• 2:46
  Speaker 0: And if you go way back to high school, I always had serious learning difficulties and really couldn't read, had a lot of trouble reading, dropped out of high school.
• 2:58
  Speaker 0: just after my junior year, I took the SAT, which of course, you know, in America is the sort of the college entrance exam.
• 3:07
  Speaker 0: And I did really well.
• 3:08
  Speaker 0: So I just went off to college instead of finishing high school.
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: And, you know, I came from a family that didn't have a history or tradition of going to college.
• 3:19
  Speaker 0: So I didn't have any encumbrances or expectations from my family, which was really freeing.
• 3:28
  Speaker 0: They would often ask me why I didn't do something productive, like learn to drive a truck.
• 3:34
  Speaker 0: So that really began my interest in exploring just different ways of working, different ways of thinking, different ways of doing things.
• 3:44
  Speaker 0: And I've always been an opportunist.
• 3:46
  Speaker 0: So when an opportunity comes, I'm quick to take it if I think it's a good one.
• 3:52
  Speaker 0: And that is why I have this sort of serpentine serially.
• 3:58
  Speaker 0: interdisciplinary history.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: Non-linearity opportunism.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Perfect combination.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: I want to focus our conversation at least to start on environmental governance.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Since the problem at this point seems to me as a non-scientist, it's not the science.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The science is pretty clear.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: But this is a wicked problem.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: We live in a nation-state world with weak global governance.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: confronting problems that manifest globally but are caused locally.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, and it's a world driven by deep social, political, ideological differences and characterized by dramatic inequality of power.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: And power matters when you're worrying about these kinds of issues.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: So I'm less surprised that the cop process hasn't produced than I am that we keep on trying because we just do what we do over and over and over again.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Can this be fixed?
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Can it be thought of in a nonlinear way?
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: because clearly that's what we need now?
• 4:58
  Speaker 0: There may be problems that are manifested globally, but they're not experienced globally.
• 5:03
  Speaker 0: And I think if you turn the clock back, there were a couple of things that happened in relatively short succession that put us on this path to constantly searching for global answers.
• 5:16
  Speaker 0: And so one was the success of the Montreal Protocol that led to the... limiting an ultimate banning of CFCs and refrigerants and things like that.
• 5:29
  Speaker 0: That was really important.
• 5:31
  Speaker 0: And shortly thereafter, there was a speech that was made by an Indian diplomat where he said climate change is a global problem that needs a global solution.
• 5:42
  Speaker 0: And people really latched on to that.
• 5:45
  Speaker 0: And I think that was a big distraction because while it's true, you know, we could if there was a grand global solution solve climate change.
• 5:54
  Speaker 0: There are very many grand global solutions to anything.
• 5:57
  Speaker 0: And they're even fewer that are long lasting.
• 6:01
  Speaker 0: Yet we continue to pursue those kind of global solutions, not just at a governance level, but at philanthropic levels.
• 6:10
  Speaker 0: The way we do science, including sustainability science, there's was this push, I think, for global solutions as the fastest way to get to where we want it to be.
• 6:24
  Speaker 0: And the one way we could think about things and feel like we were a bit in control of the thought process, because when you really think about it, the world is an incredibly diverse place.
• 6:38
  Speaker 0: And the people that live there have such a wide variety of potential solutions.
• 6:47
  Speaker 0: that they can try, that they've been using, and many of them are wildly different.
• 6:52
  Speaker 0: So it's really hard to get your head around all the different ways that you can tackle climate change, adapt the climate change, work on ocean issues.
• 7:03
  Speaker 0: And I think because of that, because the wickedness really lies in the diversity and complexity of the problem, not necessarily in How do we get everybody to come together at a global kumbaya and solve these problems?
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: In fairness to the nineties, that if you go back, we just had the end of the Soviet Union.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: We had the apparent, with all due respect to Mr.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Fukuyama, the end of history.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: We were all going to live in democratic market capitalism.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: So it was the heyday of the globalization concept, not reality, but concept.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: So it's easy to imagine how in that celebratory moment, we'd say, ah, let's do this globally because we all are the same now.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: So we'll just get on with it.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Now, of course, that was a moment that came and went very quickly.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Fukuyama is the person who best knows that he didn't really mean it was the end of history.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: He got misinterpreted.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: But we are where we are.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And as I said a couple moments ago, we keep on doing the same thing and expecting different results, which Einstein told us a long time ago is one definition of nuts.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: How do we throw off the baggage of thirty years of doing something that's not working and revisit the problem as the complex problem you describe?
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: that by definition requires complex solutions.
• 8:44
  Speaker 0: Part of that, I think, is shining a brighter light on the successes that have been occurring at smaller scales.
• 8:53
  Speaker 0: And there are many of those successes.
• 8:55
  Speaker 0: One of the things that we're seeing around the world is this re-recognition of the value of Indigenous ways of working and success that we're seeing there.
• 9:08
  Speaker 0: And we're starting to get more and more solid data showing that Indigenous communities do quite a good job of protecting their environment when they have authority and sovereignty over that environment.
• 9:25
  Speaker 0: We have to get those messages out and we have to talk about them more.
• 9:31
  Speaker 0: I don't think pursuing these global solutions was in itself bad.
• 9:35
  Speaker 0: I mean, you always have to have that kind of hope.
• 9:38
  Speaker 0: I think we put too many of our eggs in that basket and really didn't pay attention to what was happening at local levels, these small scale successes, and we really need to be working more to understand how those successes are working, why they're working, and what do we need to do to help that scale up?
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: No, I was going to say the tragedy though is the timeline, which is to say in Jimmy Carter was President of the United States.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: As you may know, he was handed a two-page memo, which was spot-on, got the sixty thousand foot description of climate exactly right, talked about the inevitability on then-President course of global warming, its consequence, etc.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: And unfortunately, it got shelved with the comment, not from President Carter, but from Secretary Slesinger, that we don't know enough.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: So let's do the science first, and now fast forward all these many years later, and the science is really quite good.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: It's excellent, in fact.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: But we waste it in some ways all of those years, and there's a sense that you can't get those years back, that we're fighting a timeline that's winning.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Why is that too pessimistic?
• 11:03
  Speaker 0: It's not about science.
• 11:05
  Speaker 0: So the science can tell us what's happening.
• 11:08
  Speaker 0: And the science can tell us if what we're doing is working, but science cannot tell us what to do.
• 11:15
  Speaker 0: Because what to do is ultimately a social choice.
• 11:19
  Speaker 0: And I think that's where we've gone astray.
• 11:23
  Speaker 0: You know, you'll have people say, well, we need to do what the science tells us to do.
• 11:28
  Speaker 0: The science just doesn't tell us what to do.
• 11:30
  Speaker 0: The science tells us what is.
• 11:33
  Speaker 0: And even the way we think of science is not the way that Indigenous people have come to see the world.
• 11:40
  Speaker 0: And so a lot of the work that I do is trying to make sense of these academic ways of thinking and these Indigenous ways of thinking.
• 11:52
  Speaker 0: Because what we see over and over again is when the science-based approaches come to these Indigenous communities, things stop working.
• 12:01
  Speaker 0: And it's because there are things that are happening in that community that we don't understand.
• 12:06
  Speaker 0: They're not easy.
• 12:07
  Speaker 0: to quantify scientifically.
• 12:09
  Speaker 0: Now what we can quantify with science is whether indigenous ways of working yield results.
• 12:17
  Speaker 0: We can see that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 0: But the science in itself isn't enough.
• 12:23
  Speaker 0: And so I think that really is the problem.
• 12:24
  Speaker 0: And we assumed that there was some kind of global scientific answer that would apply to everybody.
• 12:32
  Speaker 0: In the ocean world where I work, there was a big push, especially out of the intergovernmental oceanographic commission, stop talking about oceans and start talking about the ocean.
• 12:44
  Speaker 0: Because the science told us it was all one ocean.
• 12:48
  Speaker 0: It was all connected to each other.
• 12:51
  Speaker 0: But that doesn't make any sense at all from a human perspective.
• 12:54
  Speaker 0: The people who live in these oceans are dramatically different.
• 12:57
  Speaker 0: And they use the ocean differently.
• 13:00
  Speaker 0: Their knowledge of the ocean is different.
• 13:02
  Speaker 0: And even the animals and plants that live in the ocean.
• 13:06
  Speaker 0: are different from basin to basin to basin.
• 13:09
  Speaker 0: So we have seen this whole sort of global thought process about how do we manage the ocean?
• 13:18
  Speaker 0: Pull us away from how do we manage the oceans?
• 13:22
  Speaker 0: And that has been to our detriment in most cases.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: What do war lessons from Gaza, rethinking education, peace in Ukraine, and visionary leadership have in common?
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: They are all themes from recent episodes of this podcast.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Check out more episodes on tellbergfoundation.org or on a platform of your choice.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Can you give us an example of how Indigenous thinking and scientific thinking not clash but sort of head in different directions?
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I think it'd be useful to ground truth it.
• 14:04
  Speaker 0: The clearest thing that you see is that in science, we have for a very long time thought about natural science and social science.
• 14:12
  Speaker 0: We break science up into boxes, in disciplines.
• 14:15
  Speaker 0: And that's not at all how many Indigenous people think.
• 14:19
  Speaker 0: Let me just say that there's no single Indigenous way of thinking, either.
• 14:24
  Speaker 0: And part of my work has shown how different Indigenous worldviews are.
• 14:31
  Speaker 0: But the... The scientist often sort of looks at the world and says, what can I measure?
• 14:38
  Speaker 0: And then how can I measure it?
• 14:40
  Speaker 0: And then how can I monitor changes there and make sense of it?
• 14:45
  Speaker 0: What kind of questions can I answer with that?
• 14:48
  Speaker 0: And that isn't how indigenous people think necessarily.
• 14:52
  Speaker 0: And there's this, you hear it over and over again, you can't manage what you can't measure.
• 14:58
  Speaker 0: But in fact, what has happened really, is we tend to manage what we can measure and we forget about everything else.
• 15:05
  Speaker 0: And so that is a very scientific way of thinking.
• 15:09
  Speaker 0: Let's look at the data and decide what's the right policy decision.
• 15:13
  Speaker 0: The indigenous way is what does our culture tell us?
• 15:17
  Speaker 0: What are we feeling from our experience?
• 15:20
  Speaker 0: How do we put all of that together to understand what's happening in our environment and what's working or what's not working?
• 15:27
  Speaker 0: So it's that blending of culture experience, religion, food, all of this on the indigenous side, that means you can't break it up into easily measured chunks and figure out what's the way forward.
• 15:45
  Speaker 0: And this is why indigenous cultures tend to rely so heavily on elders and people who have lots of lived experience in nature, particularly hunters and fishers.
• 16:02
  Speaker 0: They go to these people and say, how are things?
• 16:06
  Speaker 0: How is the ocean doing?
• 16:08
  Speaker 0: And people can tell you because they're on the water every day.
• 16:11
  Speaker 0: I don't think it's doing very well, or I think it's actually, this is a good year.
• 16:16
  Speaker 0: Not because they've measured it and put it in a spreadsheet, but because they are keeping track in their head and in their stories and in their songs of what we're here, what fish were here this year, what fish were here last year.
• 16:31
  Speaker 0: what fish were here fifty years ago and a hundred years ago, and making sense of that with these other changes that include social change and climate change and everything else.
• 16:44
  Speaker 0: But it's done in a very holistic way.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: In a sense, though, those are markers of change.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I'm thinking the first time I was in Green, Northern Greenland, asking someone what had changed in his life, and he immediately said the seal meat had gotten.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Sour that there was a change in in the taste of the seal meat, which was a perfect marker of all sorts of other things going on.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: the question though is beyond that And I hate to use the Western word, but I'll use the Western word solutions.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: How do you live with in his case?
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: He just a seal meat.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: He didn't like anymore, but he had to eat it.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Now, but how do you?
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: How can we learn?
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: How can we?
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: the West, I guess, or we, the system, learn from these experiences of success.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: We've centuries coping with change that we don't like because they don't fit in our spreadsheets.
• 17:43
  Speaker 0: The first is that outsiders shouldn't arrive with solutions if they want to help.
• 17:52
  Speaker 0: And so this is the thing that in my networks, we recognize that everyone has solutions.
• 18:01
  Speaker 0: What they don't have is resources.
• 18:04
  Speaker 0: And some of these solutions have been lost and they need to be refound because a lot of indigenous knowledge has been lost because of colonization, because people have moved and they don't fish and hunt the way they used to.
• 18:18
  Speaker 0: So we have to put this indigenous knowledge back together again.
• 18:24
  Speaker 0: But the solutions We're there.
• 18:27
  Speaker 0: It's a matter of trying to find them and then share the solutions at a level that's horizontal and closer to the ground.
• 18:36
  Speaker 0: And the solutions don't come from outside or above.
• 18:40
  Speaker 0: And there certainly isn't one solution.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: But implicit in that is that there are solutions.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: And indeed, you use the word hope a couple times or words like hope a couple times.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: And I struggle with whether there are solutions, which is not to say that I think the world is going to end in some fiery bad movie, but rather that the really dramatic changes we're seeing on land, in the air, on the seas, are currently accelerating.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: and it's about coping, not preventing.
• 19:17
  Speaker 0: I think part of it is in the time frame that we... unconsciously attached to solutions.
• 19:26
  Speaker 0: We think of a solution as a fix.
• 19:29
  Speaker 0: And I think indigenous people don't think of solutions as fixing.
• 19:33
  Speaker 0: They think of them, you called it coping.
• 19:38
  Speaker 0: A lot of my colleagues, I think at the indigenous level would just think of it as managing, dealing, working with these changes, not fixing them.
• 19:49
  Speaker 0: And so that's solution implies that you're going to go fix something.
• 19:53
  Speaker 0: And I think there's a real engineering mindset behind the word solution.
• 20:01
  Speaker 0: Whereas if you think about it in more of a Zen-like way, you want to give people the tools to adapt, adjust, constantly be revisiting their understanding of what's happening around them and the things they're doing.
• 20:22
  Speaker 0: within the Indigenous communities that I work, people don't like to talk about traditional knowledge anymore or traditional ways of working because that was the old school.
• 20:34
  Speaker 0: That was a different climate.
• 20:36
  Speaker 0: That was a different world.
• 20:38
  Speaker 0: They like to talk about Indigenous ways of working.
• 20:41
  Speaker 0: And so what I see in my network is we have a lot of people who are both Indigenous and have studied in academic institutions.
• 20:50
  Speaker 0: and they come back home and they create blends of these Indigenous approaches and academic approaches.
• 20:59
  Speaker 0: And you may have noticed I keep saying academic and not Western because there's a lot of stuff in the Western world that's not academic, that's Indigenous, and there's a lot of stuff in the Eastern world that's academic and not Western.
• 21:11
  Speaker 0: So this divide between academic and Indigenous can be very powerful when it's blended together.
• 21:20
  Speaker 0: And one of the things that I've been doing most recently is working with the European Space Agency to understand how these Indigenous leaders at the community level, say chiefs, can use satellite information to help them make decisions.
• 21:40
  Speaker 0: Because they're making decisions about large ocean areas where they don't have the number of fishers that they had in the past.
• 21:49
  Speaker 0: They're not spending as much time on the water, yet these ocean areas still affect them and they need to know what's happening there.
• 21:56
  Speaker 0: They need to know if other people are fishing.
• 21:58
  Speaker 0: They need to know how the water temperature is changing, how the oxygen is changing.
• 22:03
  Speaker 0: So we're really starting to explore how can we bring some of the benefits of modern technology to indigenous communities so they can pick and choose and use what they like.
• 22:17
  Speaker 0: And the only people who can really do that are people who are both Indigenous and trained in technology and academic science.
• 22:27
  Speaker 0: So this is why we created this foundation, the Moon Jelly Foundation, to really focus on these people, we call them Indigenous academics, who have one foot in the Indigenous world and one foot in the world of science, technology, and scholarship, because... It is a small but growing cohort that I think is going to be really powerful in helping both sides of that divide deal with a climate and an environment that's changing at a pace that nobody's seen before.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: Let's stay in the ocean for a minute.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I mentioned in passing deep sea mining, which strikes me as one of those things that probably shouldn't happen.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: Let's be polite.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: And it's both in international waters and intensely in national waters.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: The scientists I know, like Sylvia Earle, our mutual friend, are terrified that this is going ahead.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: And it seems to be going ahead at an accelerating pace.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: It's exactly the wrong thing to be doing.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Your thoughts, how risky is it?
• 23:34
  Speaker 0: There are many kinds of deep sea mining.
• 23:37
  Speaker 0: And I think at this point, They're all bad.
• 23:42
  Speaker 0: They're not all equally bad.
• 23:44
  Speaker 0: Some are far worse than others.
• 23:47
  Speaker 0: And my thoughts on the matter have changed quite a lot over the last ten years, particularly as we've learned more and more about the deep sea.
• 23:59
  Speaker 0: At one point, it looked like parks of the deep sea.
• 24:02
  Speaker 0: really weren't that biodiverse.
• 24:06
  Speaker 0: The more we know, the more we realize that that's not true.
• 24:08
  Speaker 0: There are no deserts.
• 24:10
  Speaker 0: in the deep sea.
• 24:11
  Speaker 0: There are junkyards.
• 24:13
  Speaker 0: You know, if you go off of the coast of New York or the Bay of Biscay here in Europe, you go into the deep sea and you find shopping carts and washing machines and just crazy stuff that you can't believe are there.
• 24:26
  Speaker 0: So we, as human beings, have already done a lot to damage the deep sea.
• 24:32
  Speaker 0: There's a lot of nuclear waste on the bottom of the ocean.
• 24:35
  Speaker 0: A lot of ships have been sunk, especially during World War II.
• 24:38
  Speaker 0: A lot of damage has been done.
• 24:41
  Speaker 0: And now with deep sea mining, we're talking about doing it intentionally at scales that we haven't imagined before.
• 24:48
  Speaker 0: So that's the first thing.
• 24:51
  Speaker 0: I wrote a paper about what it would take to ensure us if we really made deep sea miners ensure all of the potential damages that could occur.
• 25:05
  Speaker 0: No one would ever do it because There are the damages that we know are going to occur when you get down there and you scrape up the surface of the sea floor.
• 25:16
  Speaker 0: There are damages that were worried that could occur from plumes and light down there.
• 25:22
  Speaker 0: They're all the unknown knowns, as Donald Trump's cell would say.
• 25:25
  Speaker 0: And they could be huge.
• 25:27
  Speaker 0: And they're tectonic.
• 25:30
  Speaker 0: They have to do with food chain disruptions and all these other things.
• 25:35
  Speaker 0: And if we force deep sea miners, to put up bonds that reflected the potential magnitude of the damage they might cause and say, we'll give this back to you if none of this happens and we're wrong.
• 25:48
  Speaker 0: They wouldn't take that bet.
• 25:50
  Speaker 0: And I think that's because the potential damages would accrue to so many people while the benefits accrue to a few.
• 26:00
  Speaker 0: And so that really is what's driving deep sea mining.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: But we're back to the... what I call the we problem in quotes.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: We assumes that there is common humanity interests and concerns, the global commons, and that somehow it can be governed, that nature can be priced, that those prices can be properly allocated, all of which exists in an economist's mind.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: I was trained as an economist, you're a much better economist than I ever was.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: But we can't translate it into real governance.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: So the point is perfectly right.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: And I'll bet you, Nickel, it never happens because there's no we that's willing to do that.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: So at the end of the day, that deep sea mining probably goes ahead until it produces a catastrophe that is so overwhelming.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Think about the use of nuclear weapons in nineteen forty five.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: that you don't do it again.
• 27:07
  Speaker 0: I think the challenge at Deep Sea Mining is who bears the brunt of that catastrophe?
• 27:12
  Speaker 0: So you have some of these small islands in the Pacific, Tonga, Nui, who are already facing the catastrophe of climate change.
• 27:24
  Speaker 0: And they need to move.
• 27:25
  Speaker 0: They need resources.
• 27:27
  Speaker 0: And so they're looking at Deep Sea Mining and thinking, okay, well, we're already facing a catastrophe.
• 27:33
  Speaker 0: This could be a payoff.
• 27:35
  Speaker 0: that helps us avoid our current catastrophe.
• 27:39
  Speaker 0: And if there's another catastrophe associated with that, so be it, because we have to get off this island anyhow.
• 27:46
  Speaker 0: How do you answer that question unless you're willing to come there and help them with an equivalent amount of money and resources?
• 27:54
  Speaker 0: And this is kind of a problem that you see everywhere in the developing world.
• 27:59
  Speaker 0: It's like, well, if we don't do this bad thing, we're not going to have a hospital.
• 28:02
  Speaker 0: Will you give us a hospital?
• 28:04
  Speaker 0: Oh, we don't have any money.
• 28:05
  Speaker 0: I'm sorry, USAID is closed for business.
• 28:09
  Speaker 0: Okay.
• 28:10
  Speaker 0: Well, what are they supposed to do?
• 28:13
  Speaker 0: And that really, I think, is a challenge is many of the places where deep-sea mining, where we thought deep-sea mining would occur were places where they felt they didn't have other options.
• 28:27
  Speaker 0: Now, it looks like deep-sea mining might occur in the US.
• 28:32
  Speaker 0: In the US, easy.
• 28:34
  Speaker 0: And in Norway, where Norway hasn't ruled out the possibility of deep sea mining, that is a case where you really have to question the benefit versus the potential cost.
• 28:47
  Speaker 0: Because the potential costs are really big, and they could affect hundreds of millions of people.
• 28:53
  Speaker 0: For metals that we can find in other places, probably even sooner, and many of the metals can be found simply by recycling.
• 29:03
  Speaker 0: So it's not a good business bet.
• 29:05
  Speaker 0: But it is a good business bet for a few, but not for everyone.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: And indeed, in the nutshell, that's the problem.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: In other contexts, I've heard you make the point that the problem really is quite simple.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Humanity wants to consume too much relative to the planet's capacity to produce.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: In a sense, that's the old limited growth argument.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: which I would argue has proven true, although I said that to someone recently, and he looked at me like I had three heads, but clearly growth has been slowing down for all the reasons that we expected growth to slow down.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: But we are where we are, and the willingness of the advanced societies to consume less doesn't seem about to be institutionalized.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: How do we break that?
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Or do you disagree?
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: I
• 30:05
  Speaker 0: agree, and I think this gets at.
• 30:09
  Speaker 0: you can't solve the problem by creating new institutions necessarily.
• 30:15
  Speaker 0: You have to solve the problem by creating new ways of thinking.
• 30:20
  Speaker 0: And part of that is just resurrecting old ways of thinking.
• 30:24
  Speaker 0: So once again, getting back to some of these Indigenous communities I work with, what we're seeing in places like the Cook Islands is that many people turn their back on more traditional ways of working, traditional diets in order to earn more money.
• 30:44
  Speaker 0: A lot of people left Rautanga to go to New Zealand, and it's the Red Queen problem.
• 30:52
  Speaker 0: They're running as fast as they can to be able to buy the things that they think they need, and their kids aren't buying that anymore.
• 31:00
  Speaker 0: And what we're starting to see is children moving back.
• 31:04
  Speaker 0: two places like Rarotonga to live with their grandparents and adopting, once again, more traditional ways of eating, working, and becoming conservationists.
• 31:17
  Speaker 0: And so it's really this young generation that seems to be rediscovering what it's like to consume less, but to consume smarter.
• 31:29
  Speaker 0: And there, that's where I really derive a lot of hope.
• 31:33
  Speaker 0: I feel like our generation, we blew it.
• 31:38
  Speaker 0: We chased this dream.
• 31:40
  Speaker 0: It hasn't paid off necessarily.
• 31:43
  Speaker 0: We always talk about the fact that we are not as well off as our parents maybe.
• 31:47
  Speaker 0: That's all depends on how you define it.
• 31:49
  Speaker 0: But our kids aren't pursuing the same consumer dreams that we did.
• 31:56
  Speaker 0: And they're looking for experiences.
• 32:00
  Speaker 0: and I think that's... where the future lies, if we can get people to see that there is joy and utility and happiness in consuming the ways that are not necessarily coming out of big box stores.
• 32:26
  Speaker 0: And experience, I think, has real personal value, but also economic value.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine a better way to end this conversation than that.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: So thank you very much, Linwood, for this discussion and for the work you've been doing for a long period of time.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: And we'll continue doing for a long period of time.
• 32:46
  Speaker 0: Thank you for having this chat with me.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: I'm
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Remember,
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.