Factually! with Adam Conover - The Truth about the Americas in 1491 with Charles C. Mann

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

This week Adam welcomes an author whose book blew his mind more than perhaps any other. Americans are typically taught that prior to the arrival of European settlers, indigenous communities were sparsely populated, lacked technology, and did little to shape the natural landscape. But as this week’s guest Charles C. Mann’s 1491 tells Adam, the most recent research reveals that the American indigenous civilizations were sophisticated, dynamic, and massively populated. Purchase his books 1491 and 1493 at http://factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello there. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. You know, when I think about what I do, which I do often, I sit there going, what the hell do I do? What do you call this fucking job? Here's what I think it is. What I try to do is I read something. I experience something. I learn something that changes the way that I see the world in fundamental ways.

It knocks me off my chair going, what the fuck? Everything is different now. And then I try to tell it to you through comedy. That's it. That's the long and the short of it. That's what Adam ruins. Everything was. That's what this podcast is. That's what my standup is. That is what I do. Well, today I would like to tell you about one of the most mind blowing things I ever learned. This revelation to me, I still marvel at when I think about. It is so enormous that it changed the way that I think about the place I live in, the continent that I live in, the way I relate to other people, the way I think about my society. It is truly massive. And here it is. If you grew up like I did, I grew up as a white kid on Long Island in the 90s taking history class. What you learned, what I learned about the, quote, pre-history,

I'm using scare quotes there, of the Americas is that before Columbus, there were a couple civilizations in Central and South America. You know, there was maybe you heard about the Aztecs or whatever. But apart from that, it was just Indians hanging out in the woods, not doing much with the space. Right. Just a couple of people here or there and a lot of trees and empty valleys and stuff that white European settlers could just come in and make use of. That is the version that we were taught about. I learned about the Americas before Columbus as an untrammeled wilderness, an empty place. And that is a grotesquely incorrect picture. What I finally learned in my early fucking 30s

is that that is entirely wrong. New scholarship has demolished this idea of the Americas as a depopulated, empty continent. A recent study that collected decades of work on the topic estimates that there were actually around 60 million people in the Americas at the time of Columbus. 60 million. For reference, the population of Europe at the time was just between 70 and 88 million. So the Americas were basically on par with Europe in terms of population. This was not an empty continent. This landscape was teeming with people. And not only that, the civilizations

in the Americas were advanced and dynamic. The Incas created a network of roads as many as 37,000 miles long. This was a couple centuries before Eisenhower did it. The Incas were building roads everywhere. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, had hundreds of thousands of people, making it as large as many of the capitals of Europe. And plus, it has, did I mention this, pyramids. London ain't got no pyramids. And not only that, the people of the Americas were incredibly diverse. In North America alone, there were upwards of 300 distinct languages spoken. So put it all together, we got people, we got cities, we got roads, we got advanced learning and education. How did the story that we tell each other today end up being so

incredibly wrong? Well, here's what happened. After Columbus, successive waves of illness, of disease brought to the Americas by Columbus and explorers like him swept across the countryside. The people that lived here had little to no immunity to these diseases. And as a result, they killed up to 90 percent of the population of the Americas. Yeah, 90 percent, you know, as in almost everyone. This was a complete cataclysm. The death toll is almost unimaginable. To give you some perspective, it was the largest human die off in history until World War Two, centuries later. after the European arrival,

that the temperature of the earth decreased as a result because a huge amount of farmland was retaken by natural vegetation and became a carbon sink. So many people died, it literally altered the temperature of the earth. But here's the wildest part. There was a gap. Those deaths occurred in the gap

between when the earliest explorers like Columbus came to the Americas and when the settler colonizers came decades later. So the earliest European visitors reported seeing shores that were teeming with people, land that was full of civilization. But decades later, when a newer generation of colonizers arrived, they found land that had many, many less people in it. The accounts of those colonizers were the ones that were widely disseminated and read when, in fact, it was European germs that killed upwards of 50 million people right before those colonizers arrived. And this notion was perpetuated due to a self-serving and racist colonial myth that seems to say, hey, there were hardly any Native Americans here. So, you know, they weren't really using the land. There weren't that many of them anyway.

So let's just come in and make our own homes, right? There's plenty of room on this continent. Plenty of empty space for us Europeans to come into and, you know, build our buildings and plant our shit everywhere. It's an empty, untrammeled wilderness. It's ripe for the taking. When in fact, the people who perpetuated that myth in many cases knew quite well that there were people here. It's erasure, pure and simple. Now, this revelation rocked my world. It gave me a stark new way to look at the very ground that I stand on. Like learning about this is like learning that dinosaurs never actually

existed or that the earth doesn't really revolve around the sun. That's just a myth that Copernicus made up because he was being sponsored by the round earth lobby, which is actually what a lot of flat earthers think. So that one's false, okay? But this one is true. It completely recontextualized everything that I thought I knew about the place that I live in. Now, I read about this in an incredible book called 1491. And this book didn't originate this research,

but it did the incredibly important job of reviewing it, surveying it, writing it up into a format that a lay person like me could read and understand and underlined the importance and the revelations that this new perspective gives us.

That is the work of truly great science journalism. It takes the research and uses it to help us see the world in a new way. Well, I am so proud and excited to say that on the show today, we have the author of 1491. Charles Seaman is one of the foremost science journalists working today.

And he's the author not just of 1491, but the follow-up 1493, and most recently, The Wizard and the Prophet. His work has meant a great deal to me, and I could not be more thrilled to have him on the show. Let's get right to the interview. Please welcome Charles Seaman. Charles, it's so wonderful to have you. Oh, it's my pleasure to be with you. I'm so thrilled to have you. I've been a fan of your work for a very, very long time. Your book, 1491, which I know is a number of years in the past for you now, but was a huge revelation for me in the way that I thought about the world and the continent that I live on. I've been trying to figure out where to start because your work covers so much ground.

You wrote a piece for The Atlantic last June that I thought tied together some threads where you were writing about the pandemic. And a line really jumped out at me that I thought might be an interesting starting point, which was you wrote that for Native Americans, the epidemic era actually lasted for centuries. And I wondered if you could like expand on that thought for a bit for us. Sure. By a bunch of historical circumstances

that we can talk about, if you're at all curious, when Europeans arrived in the Americas, you know, after Columbus and so forth, there were very, very few epidemic diseases. There are very few diseases that one person could give another in the hemisphere at that time. 150 or so years of American history is to say that all the diseases that have been killing off people in Europe and Asia and Africa for thousands and thousands of years were suddenly dumped on the Americas. You know, they're carried over by the Spanish ships and the English ships. And the result was that somewhere between two thirds and 90 percent of the original inhabitants of the Americas died. It was the worst demographic catastrophe in the history of the world. And it kept going on. I mean, you know, the Comanches had, you know, done everything. They kicked out the Spaniards.

They kicked out the Texans. They kicked out the Americans. Smallpox comes in and basically does them in. And that's in, you know, the 19th century. And up until, you know, the 30s, plagues were killing off Native Americans because they did not have these exposure to the diseases for centuries and centuries and centuries the way that Europeans and Asians and Africans did. And so in a certain horrible way for Indian country, this is nothing new. country this is nothing new yeah i mean this revelation from from 1491 this is where i first encountered it that the the population of north america was vastly vastly higher than our popular image of it than what i was taught in school than you know any sort of television or movie depiction

of what north america was like um and that disease had wiped out most of the people there before most European settlers even arrived. The earliest explorers brought it. They wiped out how many hundreds of millions of people, an incredibly large number of people, but potentially an incredibly large. I mean, it's really hard to know how many be right because you're like looking at a bank account that's been robbed and trying to guess how much money used to be there. You know, so you can't really know. But the typical estimates now are that there are somewhere around 40 to 60 million people in the Americas at the time that Columbus hit. I should note that these estimates keep rising a little bit. But one way to think about that is that there are roughly as many people in Western in Europe as there was in the Americas at the time of Columbus.

And that picture really dramatically changed over the next couple of centuries. But this is a truth that, I mean, you wrote this book in 2005, right? Or that's when it was published. And this is based on research that was going on, I assume, for years before that. And, you know, it's only solidified more now. And yet the truth of that is something that like we still have trouble internalizing, like there like there hasn't been a mass change in consciousness of what North America was like among those of us who now live

here. And I don't know, there seems to be a problem of even when we revise our notion of the past, like integrating that into our understanding of the present, even as vis-a-vis the pandemic. Yeah, and you also you see things like, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, Native people manage the Western landscape by burning it. Right. You know, there is a huge amounts of a, and it's called even, they even have a name for it, tech, T-E-K, traditional ecological knowledge. And there are techniques for burning this, you know, landscape in such a way as to make it productive and livable. And the people died from epidemics and then followed by, you know, wars and mistreatment and all the other horrible things that then happened. And none of that knowledge was taken up by the U.S. government.

And so he comprehensively mismanaged the forests of the West for, you know, 100, 150 years. And the results are what we now have in California. And so they kind of if we truly understood that these landscapes had been thoroughly inhabited by people who figured out how to live there, we might not have made these sort of beginners mistakes. I thank you. I thank you for talking to me about this, even though, again, this is work that you first started diving into over 15 years ago because and I read the book years ago. But every time I think about the revelations from this book, I'm like stunned again every time they come to me. Do you experience that? Are you in that like state of astonishment about this as you think about it? Yeah.

I mean, it's really, really hard to overcome your, you know, what you learned in childhood. And I learned the same thing probably you did in childhood. I can even recall my textbook saying that the Eastern Forest, you know, was so big and dense that a squirrel could jump from Cape Cod to the Mississippi, you know, just on the branches of the trees. And this was in my textbook. I just thought, whoa, this sort of forest, dark and deep. And, you know, it never occurred to me that, of course, that would be a horrible place to live. You know, there'd be no sunlight there. You couldn't grow corn.

You couldn't do anything there. And, in fact, people didn't live like that. There was huge patches of big, cleared land. And this was recorded by the colonists. But when the Native people were killed off by disease and mistreatment and all the other things that we talked about, the forest grew back. And so somebody like Thoreau was looking at basically what was a cemetery, right, where the lands had gone feral. And he thought it always been that way. And this is just deeply lodged in, you know, my mind as well. And for obvious reasons, a lot of Native people wouldn't,

you know, get pissed off about it. Yeah, I mean, just that revelation that so much of what we think of as the white colonial experience, and, you know, those writers Thoreau or earlier settlers who, you know, would write down, ah, look at this primeval forest that nobody lives in. They were experiencing a relatively new development, a forest that had grown back because all of these people had suddenly disappeared and they missed it. They didn't, they showed up just after this happened and they thought that they were seeing something that was ages old.

That's incredible. Exactly. And it's a sort of the founding myth of unfortunately the environmental movement. And you see it in things like the wilderness act of 1963, which is dedicated to, you know, preserving, what is it, the lands untrammeled by the hands of man, I think is the language in the preface. And it's, you know, actually taking places that were heavily inhabited, heavily modified, and heavily settled by the heavily inhabited, heavily modified, and heavily settled by the original people.

And kind of, you know, I think, inadvertently writing them out of history, erasing them. And, you know, it's a bad just because it's not true. And it's also bad because it means that we've comprehensively mismanaged so much of the land as a result of this myth. There's a geographer named William Denevan and calls it the pristine myth. And I think that's a pretty good word for it. Pretty good term for it. Yeah. Yeah. It's even beyond those negative consequences. It also means we're not doing the thing that we think we're doing.

When you go to, you know, one of the great national parks in the United States and you say, ah, we preserved this land. We said, no, one's going to build anything here. We're going to keep this the way it's always been. by doing so, transformed the land, that we're actually seeing a landscape that we created in the last few hundred years. We're not seeing a preserved little corner of this is how it always was. So, and that's particularly true

for even for places like Yosemite. Muir went there and he thought, and it's beautiful. I mean, it is beautiful, but he didn't understand that the beauty he was seeing was because it was a garden. It was a tended landscape, you know, a quote artificial, if you want to use that kind of language. He saw the people living there who had been living there forever and ever and ever.

And he thought they were squatters and they were bad. They shouldn't be doing this because they were doing stuff that was, you know, messing around with nature. And in fact, the Park Service made a concerted effort to kick them out. And I don't think the last indigenous people were kicked out of Yosemite until the middle of the 20th century. You know, so there is this decades long sort of shoving them out of their home process that really gives you a bad taste in the mouth. And now you go to Yosemite.

Tell me a little bit about how this you said what's happening in California now. I assume you mean the devastating fires that we had last year and will continue to have, which are, of course, you know, climate change plays a piece in this. But how does this mistake that we're talking about here cause that problem? Well, if you go to the far northeast corner, you know, you have the Klamath River, which runs down from southern Oregon and then goes sort of through the mountains and ends up in the Pacific. And you have these people who've lived there for a really long time, the Karuk, the Uruk and the Hoopa and, you know, several other nations. And if you I mean, they're still here, right? Even though California probably has the, California might have the single worst record of all the 50 states for treating its indigenous

population. There's a book that came out a few years ago about California's treatment of its natives by a guy named Madsen. It's called, it's got an unfortunately appropriate title. It's called American Genocide. So these guys, you know, they were given reservations. There was a treaty signed and so forth. And then the state of California didn't want them to have any land. So California was sort of up for grabs in terms of which, this is in the 1850s and 1860s, whether it was going to be a slave state or so forth. And to appease California, they hid the treaties. They literally hid the treaties for decades. And the result is they didn't get any land.

And when they tried to manage the land in the way that they had for thousands of years, they were arrested or shot or, you know, jailed or what have you. And there's like tons of records, these guys. And what were they trying to do? They are trying to do preventive burning. They were trying to burn the landscape to prevent the fuel from building up. And there's a whole elaborate techniques that they had developed for preventing themselves from being burned out when they were arrested.

So, you know, this didn't happen. And so there's a place in California called Happy Camp, which is a largely indigenous settlement. They got burned out this year, even though the people in it, the Uruacan, Karukans and so forth, had been begging the Forest Service for decades, literally decades, to let them burn the land preventively. And, you know, it was awful. And this has happened again and again and again in California. California is always one of the places where America's problems seem to almost coalesce and become malignant in a way and like collect like California as the depository of all these of all these things. But, yeah, my understanding is that without that controlled burning, that allows undergrowth to to rise up and which is much more flammable.

And that leads to bigger fires. Right. And it's you know, it's a pretty simple process. simple process. And there were, in fact, Forest Service guys, you know, back at the beginning of the 20th century, in the 19-teens and 20s, who saw this, and they said, no, we should not have this policy of, you know, avoiding putting out all forest fires. We should allow for burning. And there's a big fight within the Forest Service against these guys, and they were called Paiute burnings, because Paiute apparently meant primitive or bad or something. You know, this was like a slam. And, you know, they lost. And so, instead, the Forest Service inaugurated what's been called the 10 a.m. policy, which is that every fire started in the forest on day one should be out by 10 a.m. on the next day.

And I think there's general recognition that this has been totally disastrous. Because this results in if you if you squelch every fire, then there's no room for little fires to sort of less damagingly burn away what like flammable material and then when a fire does come it's enormous it's enormous and so what indigenous fires typically are are in the spring when it's wet and the temperatures are cool um then there's often you know rainfall in california you know and it gets wetter at the end of the day. So you light an area in the afternoon. The cool weather keeps the smoke down. There's not nearly as much smoke.

And then it goes out. And then they also have tricks like fire burns better uphill than downhill. So you start the fire on the top of the hill and let it burn down because it burns more slowly. There's all these tricks they know. This is tech. I shouldn't call them tricks because it's actually, you know, knowledge um technology when you have a master craftsman you know you respect it so i shouldn't technology it's tech yeah it's tech um they know all this this stuff and now typically what you have when you have wildfires is they burn when it's hottest and driest not when

it's wettest um and uh there's no to put them out. And then they burn up high, right? They burn up and they call crown fires and the tree tops of the trees keep going instead of just being down at the leaf litter. And one of the, not only is that much more destructive, but it also kills a bunch of trees and those dead trees then become the fuel for the next fire. So it's amazing how, like looking at the history of north america at the history that you're talking about makes me see one of like the biggest disasters that i've been living through uh you know i mean there were days where i couldn't leave my home last year because of the wildfires that happened in california and we here in los angeles got far from the worst of it um and looking through

the lens of history makes this event look completely different to me. I'm curious, just coming back to the pandemic, to that opening question, do you feel you see the pandemic any differently because of your study of the epidemics that were so devastating to indigenous people in North America? Well, if you think about it, one of the reasons that those epidemics were so devastating is that people who had grown up without any idea of communicable diseases were experiencing them. And there's a memoir by a Paiute woman, and there's a sentence in there that really, you know, sort of caught me. She said, we had no idea a person could pass a disease to another person any more than they could pass a wound to another person. You know, I cut my arm.

I can't give you that cut, right? Yeah. And so it's an ailment. And so the whole idea of communicability is not there because there weren't any communicable diseases. And so you have, you know, all your natural human reactions are working against you. You know, if a smallpox comes into the village, somebody gets terribly sick, what do you do? The family gathers around that person and comforts them. And what do they do?

They get the disease. They give it to their friends. Everybody panics because this horrible thing is happening. What do they do? They flee to the next village. What are they carrying? The disease. And so the logic of quarantine isn't there. And you're seeing that because now we have so little experience with that. You're seeing really crazy things in our own response to the pandemic that are basically from a lack of real understanding of how diseases spread. And so, you know, all the people who don't put face masks on, all the people who want to get together at family gatherings for the holidays, and, you know, then these become super spreader events or weddings or what have you,

And, you know, then these become super spreader events or weddings or what have you. All of these human impulses are working against us. And it's in a small way replicating exactly what happened, I think, you know, hundreds of years ago when Europeans first arrived. It's up now we're doing it to ourselves and we haven't learned a thing from the past. I mean, it does it does strike me that I'm'm not gonna say it's the first time it's happened i'm sure it's happened many other times but the degree to which uh you know uh white europeans the descendants of white europeans in north america are uh you know now being attacked by a pandemic rather than being the people who brought it somewhere else um is uh there's an irony to it yeah there's an irony to it but the irony would be a little

bit better if um native people weren't being hit so badly uh by like the navajo and uh so forth had terror in the lakota and terrible suffering from. That's not because so much of, you know, lack of knowledge. It's because they, you know, the indigenous, the health care available to indigenous people is just terrible. And, you know, as you know, so many people there don't have, you know, good electricity and running water and heat. And so it's tremendously exacerbated by poverty, which of course comes from this legacy of discrimination, which has gone on for so long. So there is this, you're absolutely right, but there's this really unpleasant side effect.

It's actually very, there's a small bit of good news on this. The Navajo, it's been recognized recognized in the navajo now i think um are in terms of just a group of people um they have more than half their populace now vaccinated i think they're ahead of everybody else in the nation uh it's really can't be understated though how much pandemics like this like change the course of history you wrote again in this atlantic piece uh the historians have seldom noted the connection between measles and the presidency of Barack Obama, which I really love that line. Can you can you share that story? Well, it is an amazing story. Basically, Hawaiian Islands, you know, if you think about it,

their place, again, with very, very few epidemic diseases, they just hadn't uh come there and uh uh the result was that when europeans came over there you know their ships they brought these diseases this is again before the germ theory of disease it was you know they knew about disease but they didn't know what it was um you know how to how really to stop it and uh the the problem with the islands uh that made it even worse is that there's nowhere to go. Right. You can't flee. You can't go to the next state. And so the islands were beset by this. They're also very worried about the United States taking them over, the native Hawaiians.

And so the king and queen of Hawaii made this plan to forestall this by formally allying with Britain. And by doing this, they were going to gain the protection of Britain. And so they went on this long voyage from Hawaii over to Europe in the 1870s. And, you know, we're about to sign this alliance when, you know, in this horrible, ironic fashion, they went to Europe and they got sick. They got measles and they died. That blew up that plan. The United States did take over Hawaii exactly as they had feared. And lo and behold, there is Barack Obama coming from Hawaii to end up as president of the United States. I mean, it's such an incredibly sad story.

I suppose a light at the end of the tunnel if you want to find a positive takeaway at the end of a story of incredible destruction and death of, you know, of a very of an entire culture. I mean, I'm not that Hawaiian culture is gone, but the the amount of life lost was massive. Yeah, and it's, you know, if you're looking at indigenous groups today, you can think of them as surviving a level of loss that, you know, is just inconceivable to those of us who aren't in those groups. I mean, these are people who within, you know, historical memory lost 30, 40, 50 percent of their people. And then we're terribly treated on top of that. Yeah. It's like, you know, if they find you and you're, you know, dazed and bleeding after being beaten up and somebody says, oh, let's rob them. Let's rob this poor guy.

North America, and I think beyond that around the world. How did you come to study that topic? And I'm also curious about how you feel as a white man, you know, studying this, studying this topic. Like, is there, is there ever a conflict for you or is there a perspective that you feel that you bring to it? um well first i got interested because um when i was a very little i moved from michigan to um area around seattle and um it didn't take much to notice that we were living right next to um you know a bunch of indian reservations there's 28 uh i, reservations in the state of Washington. And some of these folks, you know, they're around. And I come from this really sort of uber waspy family. I mean, like I have ancestors on both sides of my family. They were actually literally on the Mayfly. This is sort of what my parents were fleeing, actually, to come to Seattle, where that wouldn't matter. And so,

to come to Seattle where that wouldn't matter. And so, you know, I was sort of, even as a kid, I was sort of used to this idea, I come from an old family, you know what I mean? And I looked at these guys, I thought, like, no, I didn't. I'm a newcomer. And then, I don't know if you've ever seen the art of the Pacific Northwest, but it's just amazing. Incredible. It's beautiful.

And even as a kid, I mean, just amazing. Incredible. It's beautiful. And, uh, even as a kid, I mean, I, I, I, I could tell this was really great stuff and it was really different and it was organized. I would now say on aesthetic principles that are completely different from, you know, European aesthetic principles. And so, uh, then, but I didn't really do much of that. I just knew that they were interesting and important people until, you know, as a young adult and a science writer, I went to Yucatan and I saw the Maya ruins and I'd been to Greece and Rome and I thought, wait a minute, these are, these ruins are bigger. And to my, you know, inexpert eye, they look just as impressive. And I thought like, wait a minute, in my high school, we talked about Greek as impressive. And I thought, like, wait a minute.

In my high school, we talked about Greece and Rome, which I think we should. But I don't know if the word Maya was even mentioned. And this is my own hemisphere. So I just started getting curious. And that, you know, the way is if you're at all a freelancer, one thing leads to the next. And, yeah, to answer your second question, I didn't think like, Oh, you know, I'm, I'm not a white guy. I'm like the pastiest white guy you ever saw, um, you know, super waspy. And so, um, so I, I, I want, you know, in my inexpert way, I wondered, well, should I do this? And I talked to a guy early on named

Russell Thornton, who's actually at UCLA, a Cherokee guy, really, really excellent guy. And so I unburdened myself, you know, he hit it off and I unburdened myself. And he said, well, I'll give you some advice. He said, what? He said, a whole lot of white people forget that the people that they're writing about are human beings. Yeah. So if you just keep that in mind, you'll probably be okay. And, you know, it's really true. I don't want to hold up my cell phone as any kind of example, because I'm certainly not. But I can say that as I read stuff, quite often it occurs to me that the writer, you know, who looks like me, hasn't realized that Native people are in the room.

You know. Yeah. Right. And so I was just talking to a guy about there's a I hate to, you know, pick out a guy, you know, as a stick to beat with, but I'm going to do it anyway, I guess. There's a guy named Gwen who wrote, Pulitzer nominated, Pulitzer winning, I forget, History of the Comanche of Conor Parker, this amazing guy who was, you know, one of their major figures called Empire of the Summer Moon. I think Brad Pitt or somebody is making a movie. And if you just read it, it's talking about how they had, right in the beginning,

talks about how the Comanche had held back civilization. And these people were the last untamed, literally using that word, Indians in there. And I'm thinking, Comanche are actually reading this. And they're thinking, you know, wait a minute, wait a minute, we're civilization. you know, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We're civilization. And what, what the heck I'm tamed, you know, I'm now tamed, you know, who's going to like that. And you can say what you're talking about, you know, remember that they're in the room and you know, luckily for, for me, you know, I'm sure there are native people who absolutely hate what I've written and hate everything I stand for, but they've been kind enough not to tell me.

I mean, how do you think of yourself when you're diving into these topics? Because sometimes I think of, you know, again, as another white person, I think like, well, I'm the ignorant person, you know, like I grew up, you know, as a white kid on Long Island hearing the same stories as everybody else. And I hope that by engaging on a voyage of discovery and publicly modeling it and being astonished by what I find, I can help draw other people from ignorance to knowledge. Because there's other ignorant people like me who kind of need to hear it. And that's sometimes what I think my role is. Maybe there's white people out there who are more likely to listen to another dumb white guy when he's like, oh shit, I just learned this stuff.

You know what I mean? That's what I hope I can have the role of. Because I'm fascinated by these topics as well. But I mean, you're doing on the ground research. You're talking to native experts and doing these topics as well. But I mean, you're doing on the ground research. You're talking to native experts and doing these sorts of things. And I don't know, is there anything that you do in particular to make your role fit for you

and do it in a way that is, as you say, respectful? I guess I try to indicate that I'm really interested in hearing what they have to say. Yeah. And that it may, you know, affect what I do and how I write. And the other thing I think, this is going to sound hopelessly hokey, but it's like one of those things where you actually believe the hopelessly hokey thing. So is this that I think that, you know, a really good book is on some level an act of generosity.

that you're trying to approach it in a generous fashion. You know, years ago, I saw Penn and Teller, the magicians, and they said, don't think of us as these big experts. Think of us as these, you know, ordinary guys who've learned a couple of cool things and want to show them to you because they're so cool. And that's how I sort of think. You know, I got a chance to meet these amazing people. Yeah. And they have told me really, really cool things. how I sort of think, you know, I got a chance to meet these amazing people.

Yeah. And they have told me really, really cool things. And the other thing is that, you know, a Native person who is 75, say, has had extraordinary things happen in his or her life. You know, there's an incredible store of hundreds of thousands of people out there with just amazing stories. It's a privilege to, you know, when they, you know, from time to time, they'll let me listen to them. So I just feel really grateful about the whole business. And I'm very happy to try to share it.

It's hokey. I know. It's not at all. It's not at all. I think that's a very fundamental human trait. You know, that's a lot of what I do as an entertainer is I learned something and I thought, that's amazing. I want to tell other people. And that's such an honest emotion to have that other people respond to it when you, when that is the basis of your work. That's really cool that you feel similarly.

Yeah. And, you know, I've been just for this project we're doing reading about chaco canyon now which is this you know sort of enormous site that's in the southwest not all that far from from you guys in new mexico and uh you know the details that the archaeologists you know and especially now in the last few years when they've been much more interested in working with native people about recovering what life was like uh for the those people you can just get this little picture and i was thinking oh and i just had the gas you know uh literally yesterday i was i was writing this sort of thinking this is going to be so much fun for people to read because i had so much fun learning it and uh before we go to break

uh this this new book that you're working, you were telling me before we started rolling that it's a bit of a sequel to 1491 about the American West. It just tells us, it'll give us a little, yes, a little taste of it. So this is the sort of official version. The basic idea is that, you know, my kids a little while ago, I'm from the West and started mentioning, Oh, it wouldn't be fun for us to go back there. You know, my kids a little while ago, I'm from the West and started mentioning, oh, wouldn't it be fun for us to go back there? You know, and I was sort of imagining what would it be like this place that they're going to be 20 years from now, 30 years from now,

if they were to do that. And, you know, you can't predict the future, but there's some things that would be really strange if they didn't happen. Right. So you can't know who's going to be president, but you can know that barring something really weird, the West is going to be hotter and drier than it is now. I mean, every study says hotter and drier, right? No matter what. It's like 11th bazillionth, yeah, 11th drought in the last however many years or whatever the number is. You know, California looks like it's going to have another drought. You know, you hear this all the time, right?

Hotter and drier. The other things you can say about it, you know, whatever happens, it's going to be a center of energy. You know, the center of the energy industry. You can also say it's going to be a mixed up multicultural place. It's going to have, you know, 40 percent of its people are Hispanic origin or whatever the number is. You know, nine, nine, 10 percent indigenous. You know, there's a whole bunch of Asians on all along the Pacific Rim. I don't know what the numbers are, but the point is, it's a jumbled up, mixed up, multicultural

place. And the final thing is that since I was a kid, one of the clearest things that's been happening is that the indigenous groups of the West, I think 294 federally recognized tribes have, I think that's the number, have been recuperating their sovereignty. You know, they have they're going to be more and more like, you know, independent nations. And so so think about this future 30 years from now with this hotter, drier, you know, super complicated mosaic of ethnic groups. That looks a lot more like the West of 800 or 1200 than it does the West of 1900. Yeah. And so in some ways, the distant past has more relevance now than it did in the future. And I thought, you know, what if I wrote a history of that West, the West that's coming?

And that's the that's amazing. I I'm a history of that West, the West that's coming? And that's the idea. That's amazing. I'm looking forward to that so much. I want to talk about some of your other work, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Charles C. Mann. I'm a real, you know, super print guy, so I don't actually listen to that many podcasts, but I have listened to you. And I sort of thought, this guy sounds sort of like me. Only I hope, I hope, I only, I don't think I sound as good, but I mean, basically, in a sense that, you know, i think of myself as sort of like you know like my labrador mindless enthusiasm yeah and uh and you know that's my stock and

trade i learn things that go well that's really cool incredible i feel that way when i read your work i'm like oh i feel like our i feel like our brains work a little bit similarly in terms of what i'm what i'm interested in and the enthusiasm that i have for these topics you're also i want to say one of my favorite twitter follows because uh you know you my my guess is from reading you is that you just sort of like are you know you spend a lot of time reading research new studies that come out and you just sort of tweet when something strikes you as really fascinating and so as opposed to people who tweet every angry thought that they have, every tweet of yours is like, oh, here's something really interesting. Here's a really fascinating new idea that just came out.

Yeah. How do you go about that? That's what, yeah, that's what I mean. I actually don't think I have all that much to contribute in the discussion of whether Donald Trump is awful or not, or, you know, all these other subjects. Or, you know, I just don't think I have that much to say. But, you know, I can read scientific papers and, you know, every now and then, you know, the great thing about it is scientists are not allowed to write well. I mean, they're actually punished if they are.

So they'll take something and there's like, they're out to bore you. But then you tunnel in, you think like, holy crap, this is really interesting. Yeah. You know, in all sorts of different ways. And so then I thought this is fun to share because I don't actually think my like personal opinions about most stuff is that interesting. Well, you're like, as we all are, you're a lens right through which you're viewing this work. You have your interest and your understanding and then, you know, you're able to take it and hold it up for us and say, oh, I found this interesting. And in a way that is a little bit more intelligible, I'm not someone who can read a, you know, habitually every day read dense academic prose.

I can when I'm motivated by a research project, but it's not my day job, you know? And so you hold it up for me and I see it and I go, oh, wow. Okay. This is interesting. Charles pointed out what is cool about this. And then maybe I take that and I do that for somebody else. Cause you're one of the people that I read. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, uh, I read this so you don't have to, I read a lot of really bad pros. I often think of what I do as, you know, in entertainment and television as taking, you know, work from very good writers like yourself,

but a lot of the audience is not able to spend their evenings reading because they have kids, they're very busy, they only have 22 minutes at the end of a night to watch something. And so I take it and I make that final translation of, I read this so you don't have to and turn it into television.

As I look at all your work, I think there's like a connecting thread of our relationship with the natural world as humanity. I mean, even as you're writing about indigenous cultures and societies, there's that connection with, you know, how different cultures have managed forests and et cetera.

I know there's that, that's very much the theme of your book, The Wizard and the Prophet. Do you feel that, that theme running through? Sure. Very much. You know, I, I grew up in the seventies and the environmental movement was on board. And I also grew up in a really beautiful place, you know, relatively rural part, you know, the exurbs of Seattle. And so it's been an overwhelming concern of mine. And I also think, you know, in a way that this particular time that we're living in, it's the biggest issue we have, which is, are we going to figure out a way to live with our environment that doesn't

bite us in the ass and, you know, gives us a good place for our kids and grandchildren to live? And we're going to be making these decisions in the next 20, 30, 40 years about what kind of place we're going to be in. And they're going to resonate for centuries upon centuries. Yeah. And so as a journalist, that's the biggest story there is, I think. And so it's, you know, something I keep thinking about a lot.

I recently had Elizabeth Colbert on to discuss her new book, Under a White Sky, which I have not yet had the chance to read. But, you know, I'm familiar with her work and had a really wonderful conversation with her. She has a really, I want to call it sort of devastatingly clear eyed view of how we have altered the planet and our prospects for preserving it or reversing any of those alterations. I'm curious about what your overall view is about climate change or the project of changing the planet overall. Are you you feel optimistic or pessimistic or do you where do you put yourself? Well, I guess let me ask you a question. I'll tell you what seems to me to be a really plausible scenario for 30 or 40 years from now.

We blow past two degrees and we're at like 2.5 degrees. OK, so there's a lot of bad stuff happens from that. But right now there's 1.3 billion people without electricity and 2 billion maybe without potable water. Those numbers are going down. And it's quite possible that that same future will have hardly anybody without electricity, hardly anybody without running water. Is that a bad world or a good world? Oof. I mean, I guess I want to know more about the prospects of –

I want to know more about what that world looks like, right? Because how many people are being forced to, you know, move from where they live? Is Arizona still habitable? Yeah, the answer is yes, because we know that, you know, move from where they live. Is Arizona still habitable? Yeah, the answer is yes, because we know that, you know, in a severe drought that lasted for a long, long time in the 12th century, and then there is one in the 9th century, you know, there's been these mega droughts that have lasted for decades upon decades in Arizona. And Chaco Canyon was built in the middle of these fantastic irrigation systems in southern Arizona of the Hohokam, where they were based on this sort of radically different idea

about how we should deal with water, you know, were all built during these times when it was extremely hot and dry. So the answer is yes, it could be. Is it going to be like it is now? No. But is it, you know, have people figured out how to tolerate and live decent lives? And, you know, and it's, again, a question. Obviously, if a single family is forced to move and become exiled because of, you know, climate change, that's a terrible tragedy that will shake that family forever.

that will shake that family forever. But, you know, suppose on a planetary level, when you have eight or nine billion people, 100 million people over a space of 20 years are forced to move. Yeah. And but 1.3 billion people gain electricity at that time. I mean, how do you balance all that? I don't know. Yeah. But that seems to me a more accurate answer is that really bad stuff and really good stuff will happen because that's the way it's always been in human history. Yeah. Yeah. Making that calculation is you have to do sort of Peter Singer levels of ethical calculus to try to do it. And right. And even if you did, how would you know if you got the right answer? But you're right. I mean, we have to judge those things to answer your question. I don't know how I feel about that future because, OK, 2.5. Well, let's say that that means that the coral reefs are lost. Let's just as you know, and they wouldn't have been if we had hit some arbitrary other number.

I think, well, that's bad because I love coral reefs and I do think we have a duty to protect the natural world and i think it's i do think it's bad for you know unique species biodiversity to be wiped out but on the other hand we have a moral obligation to each other and to the rest of humanity and to prevent human suffering and death um and it's a difficult question to answer i don't think we should view it as a trade-off that we have to have one to have the other, that we have to kill the coral reefs in order for those people to get electricity. I think that's a false, a false choice that is often pushed on us by those who don't want us to preserve the environment and just want us to keep burning oil because, hey, that makes we can buy better. You know, we can buy more stuff that way. But yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, you're I think your moral duty is to do as much as you can to protect the coral reefs. I'm just saying if that was an outcome.

Yes. You know, how would you feel about it? And it's a very complicated situation. If you go, as I did for the research in the Wizard of Profit to, you know, tribal areas in northeast India, people are really, really poor there. And to see what even a small amount of electricity can mean for people in that situation is really profoundly, you know, moving. To see families, you know, have these little solar panels and then they get lights and suddenly, you know, they can, the kids can do their homework at night. The people

can, their family I was visiting was making these things, these sort of home-rolled cigarette-like things, bindis, you know, that has a little bit of extra money that makes a huge amount of difference when you don't have very much money. You know, they could there's all kinds of things that are happening with just a little bit of electricity. And you think like, yikes, you know, how do you weigh what that means to those families versus the other things that are that are in question? I just don't know. So the Wizard and the Prophet, I've not been so lucky as to read this book yet, but it's been on my list for a little while.

I apologize. I've read two of your books, Charles. Don't be mad at me that I haven't read every single one. But I read enough when the book came out about it to know that it's about this, what, this conflict between who you call the wizards and the prophets, the folks who want us to cut back and the folks who say, no, we can build better. We can invent new things that will improve life. And I detected that distinction in your question to a certain

extent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's about the it's a it's a it's a sort of a hybrid book, which either means it's a brilliant mashup or a complete mess. So and it's a mixture of a dual biography of these two guys who I think are really important and hardly anybody has heard of. And one of them is slightly better known when it's a guy named Norman Borlaug. And one of them, the slightly better known one, is a guy named Norman Borlaug. And he's the main figure in what's been called the Green Revolution, which is the mix of hybrid crops, irrigation and high intensity fertilizer that came in in the 1960s and 1970s and doubled, tripled or even quadrupled grain yields throughout much of the world and is the reason, is a big part of the reason that people like Paul Ehrlich, when they wrote the population bomb, these sort of classics in the 1960s, thought that there was going to be massive famines. And effectively, those famines didn't happen. And so they see numbers around like Borlaug saved a billion lives and so forth.

It's always more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. And he's a really remarkable figure. And the second guy who's truly obscure, in fact, I occasionally meet people who know who he is, and I'm completely shocked. It's a guy named William Vogt, V-O-G-T. And, you know, and I see ringing no bells and you're like 99% of the people in the world or 99.9% of the world. Right. So this is like a really, really, you know, smooth move for me commercially, which is writing a book, a biography that two people know what he's ever heard of. Both of whom are dead even.

And he is the guy who put together the ideas behind the modern environmental movement. And that is the fundamental ideas called carrying capacity, which is that there is a certain finite amount of use and consumption that can come that people can do on Earth. And if we do more, we surpass the limits set by natural systems and catastrophe is the result. And so we have to cut back and put on our cardigan sweaters and turn is the result. And so we have to, you know, cut back and put on our cardigan sweaters and, you know, turn down the thermostat and all those kinds of things that you've heard. And if you think about it, the two ideas, Borlaug, which is that we can, you know, you put on our science hats and, you know, produce our way out of our dilemmas. We can make more, we can make more better. And Vogt's idea, which is, no, that's crazy. We have to, you know, cut back. They're kind of the

opposite from each other. And Borlaug and Vogt hated each other. They only met once and they immediately didn't get along. And Vogt tried to get Borlaug shut down in this sort of half-assed way. And that's pretty much where the dialogue has been ever since the day in 1948, in 1946, when they met. You can think of it as two ends of a spectrum or a continuum or something like that. And of course, nobody is perfectly one or perfectly the other. But it's amazing how often they line up. And so, you know, if there's a certain type of person who's against nuclear power, who's against GMOs, who's, you know, in favor of large swaths of untrammeled wilderness. And then there's these other people who want everybody to pack

into cities and, you know, these high tech things, lots and lots of portable, you know, nukes powering everything and sending us to Mars. And they both think of themselves as environmentalists, right? Yeah. I, I, though, here's the thing. I feel like hearing you talk about it, that maybe those two strains are coalescing for me a little bit. I had a while back, we had a man named Saul Griffith on the show, who's, you know, an engineer who, you know, talks about how we can not solve the climate crisis, but make our biggest strides in addressing the climate crisis. If we massively, you know, electrify our grid, convert to sustainable energy sources, you know, drive down the cost of solar, all those sorts of things. And that

produces a world that is fundamentally better where energy is cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I see that same now that's you could say maybe a technocratic pro-capitalist, you know, he's a startup founder, all those sorts of things. And, you know, that's that kind of version. But that's not that different from the Green New Deal approach, which is, you know, similarly from from the most strident environmentalists are now saying, no, we can actually create jobs, have a better economy if we take climate change

really, really seriously. Seems like they're sort of coming together in that approach to me. A little bit. I mean, I think both sides would agree that, you know, one big part of the answer to climate change is electrifying everything, and then generating that energy in a carbon-free way. So far, everybody's on board with this. But there's a whole other argument that one side says, well, that simply can't happen from solar and wind. It has to happen with nuclear, and probably it's going to need fossil fuels. And we're going to have to have something called carbon capture and storage to these big plants to capture the CO2 and inject it into the ground.

And so there's this big central and all that involves big centralized facilities, you know, feeding it out to to everybody, which is sort of the model we now have because there's been economies of scale and so forth. The other side says, no, that's anti-democratic. These institutions don't care about you. What we need to have is these networked neighborhood level installations of solar and wind. Everybody's, you know, me and you swapping our power back and forth, all under our control. We're all living much closer to the land. Do you see the difference?

And these guys say, no, that will never work. And, you know, so there's a big fight in there, even though you're absolutely right. They both say electrify everything and do it in a carbon free way. Yeah. Now, is it impossible for people to find a common ground? No, it's not like a law of physics or anything. I'm just saying that if you look at the history of the last 60, 70 years, this fight in different ways has been going on ever since Borlaug and Vogt. You see it in the food system.

There's a guy I know, a terrific writer, Mark Bittman. There's a guy, you know, a terrific writer, Mark Bittman. He's just written a book, which is about how, in his view, you know, animal, vegetable junk. And he's terrific. And it's about, in his view, how giant agriculture has ruined the food system. But the opponents will say, well, that's just crazy because what that is, it's highly productive and it means we can use less land for agriculture and we should be doubling down on this and, you know, using genetically modified things so that we'll have like, you know, the ultimate goal is to have like a single square mile of, you know, hyperproductive corn feed everybody, everything in the rest of

the country be, you know, wilderness. And, you know, so there's another area which that fight is going on. Or in California, where you have water, where you have, you know, this tremendous fight between people who want to say, no, we shouldn't be having golf courses and lawns. We need to have xeriscaping and live in a desert environment. And other people say, no, let's build all these giant desalination plants and power them by nukes. You know, California has 25 plans for 25 gigantic plants, plus this huge thing where they're going to take the Sacramento, I think it's the Sacramento River and funnel it down south in another giant canal project.

You guys, I think it's the last like non-channeled river in California. There's some huge project they want to build in the inner part of the state. Wow. That's another part of that kind of fight. So it's going on, you know, under your feet. Yeah. I guess literally. And there you are in Los Angeles. It's your water that they're fighting, but you should really pay attention to this. Yeah. I don't know about this one. But is there, okay, I'm not going to ask you to, to choose a side because I feel like that would be inimical to your project. And I feel like I know what your, what your answer would be to that.

But to me, is there, my question is, is, is there a synthesis of, of those approaches? Because when I look at, I said, well, you know, the cutback mentality, uh, I spoke about in the intro to our, our episode with Saul Griffith, that,ith that it's sort of fundamentally self-defeating. People won't do it. You can't tell people just to live worse lives with colder thermostats. And it mathematically won't solve the climate crisis, even if we did that. And then on the other hand, the idea that, oh, we can continue growing at exactly the same rate, that we have to change nothing. You know, we can continue.

Exxon can keep having massive profits. You know, the economy can keep growing by this amount every single year. And we can solve climate change at the same time. Tends to people who are wedded to that idea tend to propose solutions like going to Mars or carbon capture, which are unproven. They're trying to have their cake and eat it, too, in a way that when you look at it, it doesn't actually pencil out the research isn't there. And really, you're just asking permission to keep doing what they're doing and fuck future generations. And so I look at I'm like, well, at the end of the day, it seems like we need to synthesize these two views and and find some sort of I don't want to say middle ground. But what is your what is your view on that? sort of, I don't want to say middle ground, but what is your, what is your view on that? Oh, I mean, again, this is not laws of physics, right? So obviously you can synthesize them. The question is whether people will. And so, you know, here I'm now, what I was telling you before, I think pretty much throughout this conversation was in the realm of fact, right? You know, I was trying to tell you facts that happened.

So now you're asking me, could there be a synthesis? And we're entering like a different realm. And I'm just some guy, I'm just some guy, you know, at the coffee shop, right? That you were unlucky enough to sit next to. So, and we somehow got into this conversation. And because you were so desperate for conversation after COVID, that you would talk to anybody. You're willing to hear me out here, right? Yes. Yeah. You understand what I say. This is so like the giant cabbage. So think so. I guess I think about it often in this. I talked to a demographer, a really smart guy once named Nathan Kivitz.

And he told me that when he came to scientific disputes like this, he thought, what would happen if you granted each side their essential premise? And, you know, what if you did? So one side's premise for like, you know, nuclear power is that nuclear power is safe. You know, that it's not going to kill anybody um and the the uh other sides um premise is that it leads you know quite naturally to giant um corporations uh and utilities that are completely unresponsive to democratic um pressure and um end up not giving a rat's ass about the um the lives of the poor workers who have to get all the uranium and this all sort of stuff. So what if you said both of those are true, that it's safe, but it has this.

So to me, you know, again, I'm just the guy in the coffee shop here. I think, well, what if we had like thought of nuclear power as a bridge fuel? You know, what if we built small, easily decommissioned neighborhoods, so to speak, nukes? And they exist. I mean, you know, in New York, they have them right in Columbia University and in Chicago,

I think still has its own reactor, the one that Fermi built, you know, back in the 40s. And there's all these small scale things. Now, and those are like under democratic control. I mean, they're they're right in the middle of big cities and they have not killed anybody yeah so i'm looking at this

and the same thing is essentially true with all those um uh nukes that power nuclear submarines yeah you know they're they're fine and so what if we did things like that on a scale and that gave us a little breathing room while we um figured renewable energy, which is still, you know, for not renewable energy. I mean, to say solar and wind, which is still in its infancy. Yeah. You know, what if we had nukes and said, we're going to build a bunch of these and they're going to last 30 years or 40 years or whatever this is. The great merit of this idea is that whenever I have brought it up, everybody hates. It makes nobody happy. But that's what they say about a good compromise, is a good compromise is one where no one's

happy. Right. And it's but I do think it that kind of thing. Here's another example for agriculture. You know, agriculture is a big climate issue. There's a whole host of issues around agriculture. Mark Bittman is completely right about everything. I don't mean opposed to genetically modified organisms, you know, due to GM plants. So what if we, again, grant the two sides there, the best and say, look, these things can be regulated, right? They are safe. You know, they're not going to kill you. You know, they're not going to kill you.

The other side, you're absolutely right. This is feeding into a system that has enormously destructive environmental and social consequences. So if you think about it, the research in agriculture, which is what GMOs are about, it's concentrated in like five or six crops, you know, wheat, rice, corn, the biggies. There are hundreds of other crops that are just completely ignored. And a lot of them are way more beneficial in a climate point of view. I think particularly of tree crops, which, you know, arboriculture it's called, and is a big deal in the global south, in places like West Africa and in the Amazon, where there's literally hundreds of tree crops.

They're completely wild, essentially. And they are very, very difficult to develop by conventional breeding because they have such long generation times. You have to breed them and then wait 10 years and then breed them. That's why the American Chestnut Foundation is moving so slowly to bring back

the American chestnut. What if you use that technology to develop tree crops, which use much less water, much less fertilization, provide shelter, provide all kinds of other benefits and took places that are dry out. And you had this kind of arboriculture or silviculture. And you could also mix it, as is in the case in northern Mexico or much of West Africa, with cattle. And there's a good reason to do that and use this technology to bring in more

climate appropriate agriculture. Yeah, this is another solution that everybody hates, but I have a kind of think that it might work. But remember, I'm just the guy at the coffee shop here. Right, right, right. No, I'm not holding you to this piece. OK, arboriculture expert Charles Seaman says that we should start small nuclear reactors all over Africa. No, I understand the point that you're making. And, you know, to me, it comes down to what what solutions are actually going to be effective and which ones are wishful thinking. And it's it's often harder than you think to tell which is which. Right. Cutting back, saying everybody should cut back on everything and that we should, you know, make our footprint smaller is itself a form of wishful thinking, because you can do that sometimes individually.

And, you know, you can use less plastic bags and you can turn down your thermostat and you can think I've done my bit when actually the solutions that are needed are in a more top down way. And similarly, you can say, oh, well, hey, you know, let's let's move to a bridge fuel. But the bridge fuel is natural gas, you know, and you've actually not solved the problem either. Yeah, exactly. I do wish that there is more imagination. You know, people talk about how we need more innovation and so forth, which is absolutely dead true. But I also think we need more imagination and more willingness to do this. And the reason that I think this isn't crazy to ask for is that fundamentally, we don't know what's going to happen. We don't really know what's going to happen 30 or 40 years from now from climate. We don't really know what the

consequences of 2.5 degrees or 3 degrees or two degrees are. I mean, you know, we can project, but we don't actually know. We similarly don't know how fast battery prices can go down or how cheaply we can make nukes or any of these things. It's a giant leap in the dark. And that's one of the things that I find consistently most personally annoying about environmental disputes is that people are very, very confident about things that I don't think that there's any reason to be confident about at all. And there's a terrific book called Climate Shock by the Weissman and Gernot Wagner, the late Professor Harvard and Gernot Wagner. like the late Professor Harvard and Gernot Wagner. And its whole point is that the big scary thing about climate change is that there's this possibility of really weird stuff happening. Yeah. That is unpredictable.

And we don't know because it's such a complicated system. And, you know, to me, it translates out as, gee, I'm so glad we randomly fooled around with the constituents of the atmosphere because, you know, finish that sentence. Right. There's no way to finish that sentence, you know, and we really, there's a, you know, a non-zero chance that something really weird could happen. And I just see no reason to experience that risk. Yeah. And but avoiding it also involves a leap into the unknown, which is means, among other things, that there's never going to be things for foreseeable future for journalists like me to write about. But also means we're on this kind of scary ride. No, I mean, you're you're absolutely right that, you know, the climate is such a massive system and pushing it in the direction that we're pushing it is going to have effects that we can't predict. I mean, the you know, just reading about the polar vortex that, you know, overtook most of polar air envelops all the way down to South Texas.

That's weird and surprising, and there's going to be other weird, surprising results. Some invasive species is going to be let loose in an area that we didn't predict because its range changed, because X, Y, Z, and that's going to have a massive effect and uh yeah the the the amount of uncertainty that we're going to be living with is maybe the only certain thing right and you know and it could also work out positively um one of the things that's really interesting is that there's this sort of sub-literature of the effects of what they call black carbon, which is soot, largely from coal burning, and particularly in Asia, where most of this sort of dirty brown coal, as they call it, is burned. And it gets onto the Himalayas, and it goes up high in the air, and it lands on the

snow of the Arctic and Antarctic and so forth. And it darkens the color of it. You know, in the scientific language, it changes the albedo. It changes the amount of light it reflects. And when dark things get hotter and it adds to tremendously to the melting of the ice caps. But the effect is incredibly short-lived. So if you really ended coal quickly, which I think is actually going likely to happen, you have this giant positive effect that suddenly happens. And it happens within months of the next snowfall covers up the snow.

And you're actually changing the color of the planet. And this, of course, should give you pause, but it might be good. And it's this kind of thing. As far as I know, that the research on the black carbon and the research on the different colors of vegetation and how they affect, there's a whole branch of new research on how warm air coming in from the Atlantic is affected by the color of the vegetation in the Middle West. And, you know, there's these mind-bogglingly complicated things that are all intertwining in a way that it's not yet, we're not yet able to put together with confidence. Yeah. And so, you know, but if you don't know what the outcome is, it could be positive.

This is an incredibly fascinating conversation, and I wish I could talk to you forever, Charles. But I got to bring it into a landing somehow. Somehow, in terms of looking at looking at all of your work, looking at your really deep research into a knowledge of native cultures and societies affecting the planet, that's a very deep understanding that I feel you have headed in two directions, right? Of a world of the past and a world of the future. And I wonder if you find yourself coming to any conclusions about them that others don't have because you have that perspective? Or is there any surprising moments at which you find those two strains in your work coming together and colliding? Well, in a way, yes. I mean, one of the things that's really striking to me is that in the past 20 or 30 years, we've learned a lot about the past climate of the West

and how it's subject to these enormous swings, these mega droughts, as they call them. And just last year, in the spring, two really quite good scientific teams concluded from separate areas of evidence that the West is entering one right now. Now, in the past, they had other causes. Now it's climate change taking in sort of a sort of a big normally big dip, if that makes any sense, and making it deeper. And the West, you know, they feel is going to be much more like something that we haven't seen for hundreds of years. And here I am reading this, you know, it's on the front page of The New York Times. And I'm reading about what life was like in the West, you know, in 1200.

And how people, you know, built these really thriving civilizations and what the principles were for them to do this. And I'm thinking like, whoa, you know, these interests of mine are colliding just a little bit here. Yeah. Which is, you know, you know, hooray, the West is getting way drier. I mean, I'm not saying that, but it's like for me personally, this is really, really fascinating. And of course,

I have kids. I have a vested interest in the outcome. I mean, there's also I mean, so much of your work is about how Native people who, you know, again, our white European conception is, oh, lived in partnership with the land and, you know, didn't touch anything that these these folks were causing wide scale changes to the environment in their own way in the same not to a smaller degree than we are um and certainly a difference of kind and of degree uh but that this is something humans do the humans change the environment that we that we live in is that a comforting thought or is that a depressing thought to you? I guess it's a it's a overall it's a comforting thought in the sense that people make.

Yeah. And people change stuff. And that's what that's that's what we do. And we've always done it. And maybe there was some perfect Edenic world, but it's been gone for for 10,000 years. You know? And one of the things that strikes me, you know, you always are reading about this and you're thinking like, what was in their minds, or at least I am trying to think about it. And it seemed to me that, I mean, this is a gross generalization because we're dealing with hundreds of different cultures, you know, and crazy different languages and belief systems and so forth. But over and over again, I think like,

I think what these people were doing was making future environments. They were trying to build a world that they wanted to live in. And, you know, and that's why there'd be these investments by the Hohokam for generations of these massive schemes to channel water and harvest water and why there is these, you know, things where they're burning and maintaining the landscape and actually incorporating the burning into their, you know, religious symbols so that it became, you know, a sacred duty to create this and maintain this landscape. And I think like, you know, that's not a bad way to think. What would what world do we want to? Yeah.

Should the environment live in look like? Let's build it. Yes. Yeah. the environment we live in look like? Let's build it. Yes. Yeah, that comes to my, something I think about a lot is that, and I've talked about on this show before, is that we do to some extent need to embrace the fact that we fundamentally change the world that we live in.

And that's something that humans do because only by embracing that, can we accept that we have a choice in the future world that we're creating and that we can create one that we have a choice in the future world that we're creating and that we can create one that preserves as many of the things as we want to preserve as we can, maybe not every single one, but, you know, as many species as we're able to, while also results in, you know, less death and more healthy, happy, flourishing lives for people, hopefully.

And you can also, thinking of it that way, sometimes I think that you can solve multiple problems at once. There's a thing in architecture called alignment, which is when, you know, you build something and it does two or three things for you. And so, for example, here, I'm speaking to you from New England and our forests are having some problems. They're mostly logged, you know, in the 19th century, and they're planted with fence posts, basically, and trees, you know, very straight trees that are used for railroad rails.

And those trees are short-lived, and they're all dying. I mean, they don't live that long. And so, we're going to have pretty soon a whole lot of dead trees in our landscape. And so we're going to start having the kind of fires you guys are having. Yeah. There's so much fuel there.

And the problem is nobody has any money to invest in, you know, this. So how can we generate this? We also have another problem. The most common tree in the entire east coast forest was the american chestnut which is wiped out by chestnut blight in beginning in 1904 they have now developed chestnuts you know that could go back in and the chestnuts are a fantastically productive tree but i don't know something like 40 of our agriculture doesn't

go you know by weight doesn't go to feeding people it% of our agriculture doesn't go, you know, by weight, doesn't go to feeding people. It's used for chemicals and dyes and, you know, cattle feed. Chestnuts are just great for this. So you could actually bring in something that would replace the dead trees, create a beautiful landscape. Chestnuts are beautiful and be a productive industry that could take some of the weight off of the industry that's, you know, from, that's threatened by the randomness of climate change. So that kind of thing, and we could say, we could build a landscape with lots of chestnuts in it.

It used to be something like a quarter of the trees east of the Mississippi were chestnuts. You could build a lot of chestnuts in and have a big, and have a big impact in a beautiful environment and solve a bunch of environmental problems at the same time. At least, you know, again, now talking as the guy sitting next to you

in the coffee shop that you can't escape from. Well, okay, last question for you. As that guy, what animates you in the research projects that you pursue? I mean, as you said, you're a freelance writer. You can work on anything that you want. You've probably, you said, you're a freelance writer. You can work on anything that you want. You've probably you've sold enough books that I think you can probably choose your topics. What is there? Is there something in the work that draws you to certain

topics or themes or or pursuits? What are you are you looking for something when you're. Yeah, I can tell you it's a it's like a feeling, you know, Navikov called it that shiver up the pursuits? What are you, are you looking for something when you're. Yeah, I can tell you, it's a, it's like a feeling, you know, Navikov called it that shiver up the nape of your spine, you know, or something like that. And for me, it's, I grew up with my dad, you know, you know, he's a wonderful guy, passed away a while ago and he would come home from work. He ran a small business and he's a smart guy. And he would have a pile of newspapers and books and magazines. And he would go through them, right?

And if he felt like he was being talked down to or pedantic or whatever, didn't have a sense of humor, he had this basket in the corner of the room. He'd throw the stuff in the basket. But his highest praise was my mother would be, you know, cooking and so forth. He would go, huh. And he'd run over and he'd say, Nina, I didn't know that. And he would tell her what he had just read. And this is like a tremendous pleasure for him. And I always think like, you know, am I, am I, am I, you know, when I'm writing, I'm looking for a subject that would make my dad go, I didn't know that.

And when I'm writing, I'm also trying to think, am I in that basket? I don't want to go in the basket. I love that so much. You're not in my basket. And your book made me exclaim in that way many times or your books have. I can't thank you enough for coming on the show. It's been such a pleasure and an honor to have you, Charles. Oh, it's my pleasure. And I look forward to listening to you in the future, even when I'm not on. Amazing. Thank you so much. I look forward to listening to you in the future, even when I'm not on. Amazing. Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to Charles Seaman for coming on the show.

If you want to pick up his books, you can check them out at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And if you purchase the book there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. purchase the book there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I record this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate you here on the show for taking a listen and we'll see you you get your social media. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate you here on the show

for taking a listen. And we'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HateGum Podcast.