The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - DJ White: "Ocean Effectivism" | The Great Simplification #51

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Show Summary:   On this episode, Nate is joined by Eco-interventionist and long time friend DJ White. DJ is not necessarily a household name, but has been instrumental in successful environmental interventions - primarily for the oceans - for the last four decades. The list of his behind-the-scenes accomplishments is long, but today he joins Nate to describe how to be effective in change-making and outline ways that current activist efforts could be improved. He also shares his own profound experiences with some of Earth's most intelligent creatures and how these cetacean friends shaped his life's work.   About DJ White:   DJ White is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and founder of EarthTrust. He has played a leading role in protecting dolphins, whales, sea turtles, and countless other marine animals, including being the driving force behind the transition to more dolphin-friendly tuna, stopping widespread use of ocean drift nets in the 1980s, successfully stopping a national dolphin drive kill, and breaking the deadlock in capping the Kuwait oil fires. To Listen on Youtube For Show Notes and Links to Learn more 

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. I would like to introduce my longtime friend and colleague DJ White. DJ is probably not a household name. He was a co-founder of Greenpeace International and started earthtrust.org 40 years ago. The first few minutes of this podcast, I talk about a long list of environmental activist accomplishments, especially in the oceans, that DJ.

is responsible for and thankful for. DJ is an interesting character. I met him as a commenter on the oil drum. 15 years ago, we became friends. He co-wrote the three textbooks for my reality 101 class. What I find so fascinating about DJ is he thinks differently than most people. He was responsible for the tall, which stands for through an alien lens in our books because he does think in an alien way.

He connects things that wouldn't normally be connected and integrates all the different topics of our current situation. He's a very colorful, though shy human being. And I think you will enjoy this first conversation with my friend DJ White. DJ White. Great to see you, my friend. Hey there, Nate. Good to see you. Yeah, we've finally doing this.

So you and I have not talked much the last couple years, but I hazard to guess without sounding hubristic that I know you and your thinking better than most humans, with the possible exception of your wife, given our thousands of emails and. and conversations and you co-writing the three books for my Reality 101 class with me. So I am honored to be able to take a deep dive into your history and your brain and your hopes and plans for the future. Well, cool. And yeah, you're probably right about that. You and I have spent a lot of time talking and collaborating and it's all good. I've enjoyed your podcasts and stuff.

We'll see if I can continue to uphold your quality standards. Well, this is a little awkward for me because knowing you, I know that you're not someone to just grab the mic and brag about what you've done and say why people should listen to your ecologically literate worldview and systems ecology perspective. So I don't really know where to start. I have like 50 questions written down that I want to ask you. But maybe I could just give an arc of what I know about your past and then start from there because I doubt that you would say it yourself. So here's what I understand. And then I'm going to ask you some questions.

So your name is known in environmental circles, but really is not a household name. and let me just speak for a few minutes and please correct me if I get anything wrong when I stop. You grew up in Indiana. You went to college. You were a geophysicist. You kind of had an epiphany and you left it cold. You started your own environmental group in Hawaii to confront the whalers on the high seas almost 50 years ago. Oh, yeah.

Wasn't it? 76. Oh, yeah. No, I was just rooffully flashing on what 50 years. is. Yeah. Well, 45 years. Continue. Yeah. Well, it's rounding it off to the nearest half hundred, but continue. Yeah. And so that effort was joined by the nation, uh, Greenpeace movement. And together, you guys bought the first fully owned campaign ship and confronted Soviet whalers. And you and I have talked about how you at that time went to Pillbox, uh, little Japanese concrete

structure on the hills of Oahu actually thinking about would you be willing to die for a whale. And we'll get into that. You subsequently wore many hats in the Greenpeace movement. You co-founded Greenpeace International. You created and ran the international dolphin campaign, along with many of its signature policies and interventions. You also conducted cetacean intelligence research starting around the same time. a story I tell to my students and is in our materials.

You formed a personal bond with a dolphin that you got to know very well, which you've told me has influenced the course of your life deeply and the promises that you made yourself to her. On the side, you co-founded many independent groups such as species survival network for CITES and Earth Trust that you still run now. You've been referred to as the patron saint of the, global drift net campaign, shutting down the world's largest destructive fishing fleet

in the 80s, saving millions of dolphins, whales, and many other species from the invisible mesh of those deep-sea drift nets. You also personally created the first international labeling regime for dolphin-friendly tuna, and we can maybe get into that later. You convinced the world's largest tuna firm to leave. legally bind itself for years to your organization's criteria for dolphin-friendly products. You and your wife, Susie, set up entire practice of illegal whaling globally by creating an undercover network. Through your direction at Earth Trust, your teams are ever saw the

bursting of illegal trade of many endangered species globally. You've also successfully stopped an ongoing national drive kill of dolphins, which still is being discussed and shown in the movie The Cove, although no one's ever heard of your efforts which were successful. And all this was focused on wildlife, but as we wrote about in our book, the bottlenecks of the 21st century, about 30 years ago, you sent your ecologist Earth Trust teams to Kuwait, where they managed to break through blockades and show the world. the hydrocarbon pollution hell that was unfolding, shutting down gushing oil while avoiding landmines and leveraging the leadership of Kuwait to open the shutting out of those oil fires to international firms and perhaps shutting in 2 billion barrels of oil, you know, the estimates would vary. So other things could be said. The first thing I would say is as someone who cares,

about other species like you do, which is probably why we came together 15 years ago. I thank you for your lifetime of work on behalf of other species who don't have a voice in our economic system. But let me just start here, Don. Why did you do all these things and what put you in a position

to be able to affect them? All comes right down to it. You know, if you only get one life, you want to spend it well. And, you know, as a child, as a boomer kid, you know, you take the jobs you could get. And so I, you know, went through college and ended up as an oil geophysicist of all things, looking for oil in the field, which is an interesting parallel to some of your backstory, being an oil expert. But, you know,

my heart was never really in it. It was actually an epiphany to me, having lived so cheaply to get through college and stuff, that when I started being paid, you know, for doing the oil exploration, I don't have to spend this all on myself. I can keep living cheaply and spend this on other species. And so for a period of time, while I was doing that, I was spending at least half of my paycheck, bigger and bigger donations to people who were, you know, doing things for other species as sort of establishing that dual identity. And then I did have, you know, what you might call an epiphany,

a beautiful, you know, Louisiana salt marsh, and just decided I was going to quit the next day, go off and save whales and dolphins. I had that point never met a whale or dolphin, but it seemed like something that needed doing and something that I felt about. It seemed like it would have meaning to me. And it did, and it does. I mean, that still has meaning to me. And, you know, I'm really glad that I took that path, you know. Each of us gets a chance for multiple paths. And I've never, I've never been sorry about that and I've recommended that sort of path to some of your former top students who I've gotten to know. So in your early 20s when you had your first job, you at that point were already carving out part of your income to allocate towards species protection. Yeah, that would have been

22 years old in 1973. And by the way, I still think that if you don't have to to, you know, go out to the boonies and start a soybean farm, a person who works for Exxon, gets a good salary, and puts half of that into effective programs, might actually be having more of a positive effect than if they just live the change they want to see on some low-key levels. So, you know, I think that's an option for people. I wish more people would think of doing that. But for me, I decided, after a while, it just felt so personal, and I felt like I could do stuff.

With my crazed motivation, if nothing else, that I figured I would do that. And I set about doing that. So my understanding is you had this epiphany. You got a one-way ticket to Hawaii because you knew there were no dolphins in Indiana. And then what happened? Everything else. As you might imagine, there were no ready opportunities to get to no dolphins, really, anywhere in the world. And as with a degree in geology, geophysics, it's like, oh, hey, you know,

how can you get into that? So I actually, I ended up scraping the shit off dolphin tanks. Let's let's cut right to that. In order to, I found, there was a university who was doing research, and that was the entry point I found, you know, they, you know, they would, they found that putting bleach in the water would give the dolphin's eyeball capacities, which is gross. So instead, they let the algae and stuff grow in the dolphin poop. and they'd have to scrub it out every week and nobody wanted to do that so uh i offered myself as free labor and there was you know a lot of slipping and falling and algae and poop and stuff like that but it got me into it and as you know i was a bright guy i was you know i and so gradually

they started realizing that uh there at the university of hawai that my you know my expertise such as it was was good enough that instead of just cleaning dolphin tanks, I could actually be helping conduct the, you know, research with the dolphins and, you know, do their little computery things. And I actually was grounded in science and stuff. So I sort of, you know, by scraping the tanks, I got into that. But as you've also alluded, it also led to me getting to know one particular dolphin fairly very well, which is something that not many people ever, it's a shame, but not a many people ever will get a chance to do. And it's not a shame that, in the sense that a little bitty, horrible tank is no place for

a dolphin to be. But I had been very interested in all the way back in college with speculations about the nature of intelligence, you know, of being. What does it mean to be a conscious being in this universe? And the notion that maybe humans weren't the only ones was fascinating to me. And so I read this book by the name of John C. Lilly. who I recommend if you and who I got to know later in life actually. But he had written speculations about, you know,

well, dolphins have got brains larger than ours and they're social and they communicate. And, you know, who are we to just assume that they are necessarily these inferior beings? Just because they're alien and different to us. And I was fascinated by that, but I didn't really necessarily buy it or believe it. And so one of the things I wanted to do is for myself, sort of confirm or deny the hypothesis that these these were people and not just like i mean i agree dogs are people and you know i've all kinds of non-human friends but are these people in the same sense we refer to other humans that is an abstract self-awareness of themselves and a sense of

humor and are most of the self-aware conscious beings on earth are most of those species he's non-human because that's what it would, you know, add up to being. And I came to the conclusion that, yeah, that is the case. The dolphins that I interacted with, in particular this one dolphin, whereas there are as much people as any person I've ever met. And I don't take away from horses and dogs or any of that kind of bond. I'm talking in terms of just not being able to predict what they're going to do. the feeling of another mind in there.

And it was important to me because it may be obvious. Anybody listen to this, but I'm probably a bit on the spectrum, as they say these days. I don't think in words. I've heard that most people tend to have sort of a running monologue of words, and that ain't me. I think in pictures. I've had to learn some words.

You know, they're coming in handy now. but, you know, when I started out, I was, you know, as a little kid, I was pretty much, you know, a screaming headbanger and, you know, that is stuff is still in there. So my wondering about, okay, what does it mean to be a person and who are there and stuff like that? It was, a lot of this stuff just gobsmacked me. It's like, holy moly, there are these, not only do these aliens exist, But we're in the middle of a Holocaust. They're being wiped out, you know, kind of on my watch. And, oh, man, it's like, so all of a sudden I had, you know,

this relatively rare knowledge base that I had and these realizations that I felt I had. And it was in the context of these friendly aliens, these intellectual critics with a sense of humor. being wiped out potentially in my lifetime. And man, there's motivation for you. It's like, how can a person believing that not try and put 110% of their lives into making that better? And that is what I decided to do. And it's, you know, in a way, it was, that was an easy call for me.

I mean, there were things like nuclear war that I wanted to not happen. There were things like environmental devastation. but being up close and personal and to know individuals of species that were very probably going to be wiped out, you know, it was not just a vague, you know, large, as existential thing. It was like, hey, hardly anybody but me knows this stuff and nothing much is being done about it. So in our book, you did write some small anecdotes about your relationship with this dolphin, And you just mentioned that this species, this alien species, dolphins, not really alien, endemic to planet Earth, just alien from a current cultural perspective, had a sense of humor. Can you tell us some stories or shed light on how you came to learn that?

Well, of course, it's a bit subjective as is everything as he get past, you know, abandoning solipsism, you know? It's like, I think you have a sense of humor and stuff like that. And it's how do I quantify that with you either? And it's a feeling that you get. Of course, it's subjective. But there are a million clues when you're closely interacting and tactually interacting too. I mean, a lot of the time I spent actually in the water in the tank with the dolphins of them doing the with this, the dolphin doing the sonar on me, communicating back and forth.

And it was a very amazing kind of a deal. But one example, I suppose, would be one of the pieces of research that I was doing back when I was doing it, not in my lab, but back University of Hawaii, was they were doing visual acuity experiments on a dolphin. And the setup was very accrued by modern standards, but it had two targets. And if the dolphin made the correct visual choice as to the one it was supposed to choose showing it had good vision, it would push the paddle associated with. that one and then the person running the trial, which in that case was me, would be hidden from dolls. In theory, the dolphin didn't know that anybody was back there. Just, you'd throw a herring over the end edge of the pond and the pool and the dolphin would get it and the operant conditioner type thing, you know, the stimulus response reward kind of a thing. Problem is this dolphin

clearly knew that I was in there. You just see the people go. You see the people go. You know, the go in there. And she knew that I was running the experiment. And she also knew that she was going to get fed the same amount of total food to the ounce, no matter how she did an experiment. So, she just had fun with it. And she'd do all kind of different games. And dolphins in general, I find they'll flip the game on you. But in this case, and I had no flexibility. There was a specific protocol I had to follow because it was, it was not my research. I would just run it, running the things. And so she'd get them all right for a while, but instead of eating the fish, she'd put them in the tank was only five feet deep. She'd build a pile of herring on the bottom.

And then she'd start getting them 100% wrong. Not chance, not chance at that point. No, no, no. When she got it right, I was supposed to push a button that made a reward siren. You got it right. And then she got the right. And then she'd get the fish, and she'd pair of that. And if you got it wrong, you'd hit a buzzer that was a claxon buzz.

You got it wrong, and you'd get no fish. So she'd make this pile of fish. fish on the floor down there. And here I was skulking behind this plywood, you know, thing, opening and revealing the things. And once she had a big enough pile of fish, she'd start getting them all wrong. Of course, you have to see just as well we get them all wrong as to get them all right. But she'd get them all wrong. And then she'd pick up a fish and Cocker, Cocker Rossstrom back to throw it.

My observation was through like a five-by-five-inch hole in the plywood, which she wasn't supposed to be able to see because they didn't think golfers could see that well. and it was dark in there, so I'd be looking to see what she was doing. And she'd push the wrong one. And I'd hit the, ah, plexing it, and she'd wing a fish through the hole and smack me in the forehead. And so she ended up shaping my behavior. She'd keep doing it smack. And it was amazing how accurate she was.

I didn't everyone hit me in the forehead, but most of them did. Wack, whack, whack, just, you know, herring against my forehead. And after a while, she started shaping my behavior. I got so tired of getting slapped in the face with herring that I would, I would wait, even though I wasn't supposed to. I'd wait in terms of pushing the Claxon buzzer. And she would wait, too. It's like she'd get it wrong.

And she'd go, I know you've got to push the buzzer dude, you know? And I'd wait for like 60 seconds. I'd find out of it. So anyway, I'd walk out of there with a data sheet that showed she was virtually blind and covered with little silver scales on my complexion. And then later on, of course, I'd go in with her. we'd swim for an hour and she's sonar my skeleton and you know what does that mean sonar your skeleton well you know they they see a dolphin's primary perception modality is sound and it's like we

had a little flashlight in our heads they can i mean when they look at a human with the sonar they're looking with something like uh you know it's like a you know x-ray like an enhanced ultrasound you know there's they can see the contents of your stomach the airspace is everything like that. And it's very interesting to be friends with a person who could see you in that way. And it was just amazing. And by the way, dolphins, she weighed 325 pounds. She could have killed me at any time.

Any full-size violinous dolphin could at any time kill anybody they're in the water with. They don't is to their credit. But interesting, the whole process of getting to know and trust each other and stuff. and over many months of spending time in with this dolphin, it was intense and it was definitely one of the most meaningful experiences of my life that is with me still today and will be always. Is this the same dolphin that you regularly did yoga with listening to music? Yeah, with this particular dolphin, you know, there was a lot of contact.

I mean, you're sliding against each other and stuff like that. And one of the things you like to do is, like, would be on the surface. surface and she would she would do it do a kind of a twist to balance my nose and her blowhole out of the water and then saying you know well holding on to my hands with her petrel fins and then it just sort of swim to the center of the pool and just yeah sounds we just sing little song sort of things and uh with her eyes closed and i closed my suit it was sort of a meditative thing so i don't know if that's dolphin yoga or whatever it is but it was a thing it wasn't it wasn't my either. It was something that she created and decided to do. And that's just one of

thousand different things that she would innovate to do. I was just in there to be friends. And she would say, okay, well, you know, we've got nothing to do. Here's all of these games. Here's all these things that we can do. And I will note that this particular dolphin was kept in solitary confinement, had not been in with another dolphin in many years. Are dolphins social creatures? They're incredibly social. And I say, that as a human introvert. But dolphins are incredibly social. It is not right to keep dolphins away from other dolphins in solitary. But this particular one was in solitary. And although I wanted to know her as well, I also felt a bit of an obligation because of this, you know, social deprivation

that she was. So I'm sure I was a very poor substitute for other dolphins. But I didn't have control over that situation. And I tried to be as good a friend as I could. And not just for her, but also while doing that, realizing, okay, this gift that I've been given, there's no way I'm ever going to be able to pay this back. But one thing I can do is save a bunch of other dolphins that I'll never meet. And I have. And I hope to continue doing that. And it's such a small payback for such a wonderful thing to have lived. That's beautiful. And I've never experienced anything like that other than what I happen upon a moose in

nature and the moose looks at me and we look at each other. And then my relationship with dogs, of course. And I've had some beautiful nature moments, but not to that extent. But my other feeling in hearing your story is our culture currently thinks of dolphins as big fish or that they do tricks at SeaWorld and things like that. And we miss the emotional, deep, sacred connection, organism to organism, interspecies relationship that you're talking about. And, I mean, maybe that's why we became friends 15 years ago,

because we both recognize how precious that is. So what do you know, I assume you know, what is the current status of dolphins in the world? And when you say that they're in peril, can you explain what you mean by that? Well, the peril is not exactly the same as it was. Some of the things that you mentioned in the intro, like dolphin-friendly tuna and getting the huge drift-knit fleets out of the oceans and various other things like, stopping the trade of dolphin meat as whale meat and stuff like that. A bunch of the things that I was able to do, you know, and playing around in human mischief space, as I call it,

because they didn't need to be done. Those things are not happening to the same degree, although dolphins are certainly under assault from the myriad of things that most of the, you know, sound pollution, plastics pollution, entanglement, everything else. But really, since about, Well, right before the time I ran into you, you know, I transitioned from doing these interventions in large ongoing kills and stuff, partially because they weren't ongoing anymore. But to figuring out, okay, what are the existential problems for humans?

Because I like humans just fine. I have a lot of humans who are friends, as you know. And, you know, what are the big issues? And the big issue for dolphins and whales, and indeed any creature in the oceans with a skeleton now, is the big thing that we're worried about CO2 because of, you know, people worry about climate carnage, which is a real thing and will happen. But really, ocean heating and stratification and acidification, those present really. really doom, unfortunately, and unless something changes to a lot of the really large, slow reproducing critters in the sea. I'm not talking just dolphins of whales, but, you know, seals, tuna, fish, other stuff like that. The things that are wiped out by rapid ecological

change are the ones that are big with a low reproductive capacity. So that's why, and, you know, you see things like, you know, the KT extinction of dinosaurs. the paleoceneasine is in thermal maximum, you end up going down to small, rapidly reproducing simple species. And I'm sorry, but dolphins and whales are not going to make the cut. Now, humans are in that same basket. We're not going to have air conditioners, you know, either, even though people think we will. But unfortunately, whereas humans are very adaptable and, you know, can probably get away with surviving and reduced numbers well into the future, there are some hard thresholds in the oceans,

like the thresholds of, you know, calcite and arachianite crystallization, you know, how acidic can things be? I mean, a child who's born today is now generally expected to outlive coral in the oceans. Now, how messed up is that? And what is something like 30, 40% of all ocean species that spends some part of their life cycle in coral reefs? And beyond that, there's a bunch of, of, you know, critters in the plankton and even, you know, things in vertebrates who require

calcium for their skeletons. If you knock that many pieces out of the food webs, then the things that are guaranteed going to be knocked out are the case-selected critters that take a long time to mature, at very low reproductive rates. We're talking about dolphins and whales. And what we need to do to save them. It's the same stuff we need to do to save us, but we need to do it quicker. And yeah, I know we're not doing it at all now in effect, but, you know, that's the deal. It's not just us. The only thing it's just us is we can make a difference, potentially. You know, we can decide. An individual can decide they want to save a million dolphins and potentially go out and do it, or they can decide that they want to advocate. I mean, we've got the largest brains that

we know of in the universe, not we have them. We, the earth, has the largest brains known of in the universe talking to each other right now under the ice in the Arctic Circle, the ice that were melting. What are they saying to each other? They've had self-awareness and advanced cognitions and huge brains long before we did. And here we are looking for fossil bacteria on other planets while turning these enormous communicative brains effectively into the don't. dog food just because, you know, we convert them into money.

We can financialize them. And unfortunately, for critters with a slow reproductive rate, it can actually make financial sense to wipe them out, bank the money, rather than waiting for them to reproduce more. I mean, that's been kind of the economics of extinction for the whales in the past. And, yeah, I've been involved in the whole whaling thing, too. We were talking about dolphins, but I ended up getting a lot into the whale stuff as well. And if you want to ever do talks about the whale stuff, I would love to see humans talk to whales.

And in principle, that could happen. You introduced me to Azarevon, who you're saying about doing that. I've told some of your other students going back many years that that's one of the things that I'd like to see happen. And it's interesting, my approach to doing that is actually quite different than this. So maybe there'll be some cross-fitalization. But there are amazing things that can be done on the planet. They're just not the amazing things that people think they want. And the amazing things that people think they want are also incidentally not possible.

So there's that. We're going to get into that. Sticking with dolphins and cetaceans, I have a side question and then kind of a profound and potentially depressing question. The side question is one of the videos that you called to my attention, but I showed to my students every year was a young dolphin who had come a foul of some fishing line and was all tangled and couldn't swim and it approached some humans defenseless can you describe the importance of that and what happened briefly i think it's important to other people it's just a cute youtube clip like you know

kittens in a box or something like that but there should there should be a hundred scientific papers written just on that one video we had a wild dolphin looked to be a young female approach scuba divers underwater because there was a hook cut in her and submit herself to what basically was, you know, knife surgery to cut the hook out of her while she held her breath. Now, I know people generally figure that, well, dolphins, you know, if they were smart, why don't they build airplanes? You know, it's, you know, why don't they build oceans? Why aren't they wiping us out in their fisheries. And it's like, this dolphin,

you imagine what does your IQ have to be? 300 in order to, there were no escaped dolphins. This wasn't a trained dolphin. And popular wisdom has it that dolphins can't talk to each other. Okay, if she hadn't heard this from another dolphin, how did she come to the deduction that she could swim up to these foreign creatures with metal tanks on their back blowing bubbles at night?

while holding a single breath, submit herself to them while they got knives out, it cut into her flesh, and just you need more than a theory of mind for that. You need to have confidence in your deduction that these critters have a theory of mind, that they will probably be motivated to help, that they can help. And then you have to have the absolute presence of thought to let these, you know, alien creatures, an alien in the sense of, you know, no common ancestor in 80 million years or so, cut into your flesh and then, okay, see you later. I mean, not that IQ is even a useful concept, really, between species,

not really even between humans. But how smart did this dolphin have to be? What human would make a series of correct deductions? You know, she nailed it. First shot, swam right up to them, submitted herself, and see, But this has been out there on YouTube. As far as I can tell, I've been people saying, oh, that's really cute.

Dolphins are smart. It's like, why aren't there a bunch of papers on what's the minimum number of cognitive benchmarks that have to be clicked off in order for this to have occurred? And so you and I co-wrote these books. Some of the concepts I made this movie, The Great Simplification Earlier this year, you were not involved in the writing of the script, yet you are in the script credits because some of the concepts were things that you coined in our writing.

And maybe it makes sense to get into a couple of these meta concepts that are foreign to most humans, but central to our worldview. Maybe we start with the biggie, which probably we could have named the book this, the carbon pulse. Can you unpack that? what it is, what it means to you, why it's important. Well, it's important to me and you and everybody listening because it's the biggest wrench, the biggest monkey wrench

that has ever been thrown at humans. It's slow in rolling out, but it may be the equivalent of the Chitzaa asteroids smacking down the dinosaurs. I refer to it as the carbon pulse. I originally coined that in our things because it's so brief. I really, we're just talking about two, three hundred years in time when, you know, time goes millions and billions of years in other directions. It's this aberrant period in which we've got essentially free energy by using the oxygen in the atmosphere and stuff we can

dig up and burn. And we're messing everything up in so many ways. And I don't know that we need to belabor that here a whole lot because it's, you know, sort of conventional wisdom now. that we're messing up the atmosphere and stuff like that. But I think what people don't necessarily get, and we lay a lot of this at the door of mythology, like neoclassical economics, is that the main currency of life, of human life anyway, is cleverness,

that the universe has been constructed in such a way that there will be cheese at the end of every maze, that our main resource is cleverness. We're obviously clever and we're not going to run out of cleverness. Therefore, Star Trek futures. Well, that's just, that's one of those crazy blindspot things that just sticks out to a person who thinks visually because it's just not right. Just being clever doesn't really get you anything. And that's the case of humans with what I don't call fossil fuels.

It's fossil carbon, fossil hydrocarbons. They're only retroactively fossil fuels if you burned them and that's a dumbass thing to do. We've only got so much. And, you know, to the extent we should burn them at all, we should probably burn them before an ice age and not like to create a, you know, a reenactment of the thermal maxima of the past. Why do you think that we could have avoided the carbon pulse or with human trajectories since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, was finding and scaling fossil carbon and hydrocarbons inevitable? Well, certainly, from the point of view generally of a species like us arising from some other planet, or certainly you could pause it in Earth in which coal was not sequestered, that there were microorganisms that would break down the lignin and stuff like that,

or that geologically there was an oil sequestered. So that's just sort of a cosmic coincidence, a big trap that was set for some creature with the brains and thumbs and, you know, a fetish for supernormal stimulus. And sexual selection. You know, yeah, we can go into read our book, folks. But our books, plural. But I don't think it was inevitable. To answer the question, you know, on this planet, I think it was clearly likely, you know,

that access to it was so ubiquitous. but even not all cultures would have necessarily done it the same way. And it didn't have to spool out the way it did exactly. You know, there are a lot of cultural things that have accelerated our burning of stuff. And even now, although a lot of people think, well, we're either doomed or everything's going to be fine. No, it's not the case. There's enormous degrees of freedom still in what can happen. And people have a hard time in taking that on board to, to, to,

realizing, okay, that there's an enormous amount of stuff that can be saved, but not everything. Well, I mean, people talk about collapse, and I think one of our mutual friends recently said, when people talk about collapse, they mean when is collapse coming for me? Because collapse is already happening to many species on earth. It's happening to the country of Madagascar and Syria and Ukraine and perhaps Bangladesh and and others. So the future is already here. It's not evenly distributed. Let me put a pin in one of the things you just mentioned, which further defines the carbon pulse in that it will never happen again because the carbon was sequestered and maintained before the evolution of termites on this planet,

which is something that tall, aka you, a road in our, our book that if we get through this period, fossil fuels are unlikely to ever get stored up in Earth's hydrocarbon battery again because when they first did, the termites and lignin eating bacteria didn't exist. So they were stored and heated and geologic pressure to turn into burnable substances later. Do you want to add anything to that? No, I think it's true. And I mean, people even look at that as good news.

If they want to, most people are not really thinking in the way that that would be good news. But no, the carbon pulse is a one-off deal. And not only for humans, but for any other species that might try and arise, they're never going to have a hydrocarbon, you know, intensive civilization, or for that matter, probably copper or anything else we're using up. You know, everything that's, you know, we've been burning these fossil carbon and hydrocarbon compounds. And at the same time, using up all of the geologically sequestered concentrations of damn there, everything else useful. So, no, future civilizations or, you know, self-aware folks on Earth, one thing that we can know is they're not going to be industrial.

They're not going to be probably building skyscrapers. they're certainly not going to be orbiting satellites. You know, it's a one-off deal. And it's good that it's a one-off deal because we're really screwing things up. And I say that as a person who is, I'm really, I'm totally into science. And I always have been. I've been to the space program. I think that stuff's really cool.

I feel commonality of feelings with people who look into space with awe. And, you know, I've known a lot of. People know. Our Dolphin Research Lab was primarily funded by Arthur C. Clark. That community, I think, really needs to refocus on possible futures. So there's a difference between science and technology and the technology community now is largely energy blind. So can you explain, and we do this in our books, and I've done this in my podcast, but I'd like to hear it from you, why we couldn't have industrial civilization without fossil carbon and hydrocarbons in the future. Can't we replace that with other technology that isn't pulling ancient sunlight from the ground? We could accomplish some very

cool things. Now, people here don't know it, but you do it. My house is festooned with solar panels, but that's not because I think that solar panels are going to, you know, get it done. And in fact, renewable energy is just a phrase. It's one of those thinking and words things that I talk about. There's no such thing as renewable energy. And, you know, the solar panels and things themselves aren't really renewable either any more than a pickup truck is. There are things you could rebuild again. But the more windmills and solar panels, the stuff we make, the more the CO2 goes up because we're burning more stuff at the same time. And of course, most of the power we use on the order of 80% is stuff we're just burning. these things so-called renewables make electricity, and that's cool and that's neat. But that's what, 20, 25% max of the current civilization we have. Now, could a civilization hypothetically be built that was entirely electrified? Yeah, probably could, but it wouldn't be this one. So, yeah, there are probably very cool paths that could be taken,

but they're not going to have the kind of material, you know, wealth overage in terms of physical wealth that we see now because that's you know even back of the envelope you can tell that's that's not going to happen and nobody is probably going to be able to make a solar panel if you put somebody on an island said okay here's here's a pile of sand make a solar panel you're not going to be able to do that I frankly don't even know I'm sure it's never happened but I don't know if it ever will happen that the solar panel is ever made with anything other than burnables you know I don't think we'd probably have solar panels or nuclear power if wood had been the only burnable that we used

our civilization would look a lot different and arguably would have been a lot better i don't know if you'd like me to go down that road but i think by about the year 1800 if we had just kept burning wood and doing other stuff i think we very well might have gotten to uh easily to the trillionth human childhood on earth whereas I think now that is a real long shot. And to me that underscores it's not just about whales and dolphins. It's about the things we risk losing are most of the human lives that haven't been lived yet because we're actively precluding them. There are other books in the news, What We O The Future, McCaskill and Nick Bostrom's existential risk, which are talking about a trillion humans could live in outer space in the future,

but they have the same ethical bottom line that you are, but in reading them or actually reading reviews of them, it seems incredibly energy blind because it assumes that we are kind of inevitably headed for the stars. They never mention coal, oil, natural gas as being the fundamental driver of industrial civilization. And the assumption is that even after we use less hydrocarbons, either voluntarily or because they deplete, that AI and other technology will replace the need for hydrocarbons and that we are destined for the stars. Can you talk about that a bit? It's just not possible. I mean, it seemed then back in the day when we were putting people on the moon real fast and everything, oh yeah, maybe this would possible.

And who knows, maybe if a large part of the Earth's, you know, fossils had been put into that. It might not have been impossible. But in retrospect, it was probably impossible even that. But there is a place for trillions of humans. And all it requires is that we don't break the planet. If you look back, like I said, say you're 1800, and if you don't say, we never got significantly and there wasn't much oil to burn, we never burn much coal, we just burned wood, well, then the human population probably would. wouldn't have ever gotten much above about a billion, and we would have, you know, wiped out some things and everything, but we wouldn't have wrecked the atmosphere. We wouldn't have acidified

the oceans. Most of the critters in the world would be fine just because they were, you know, sailboats can only get to so many places, you know, wood-fired boats, you know, most things that were screwing up would be, would have been energetically remote. And in that case, there's nothing, I mean, the average mammalian species lasts about a million years. The average large mammalians, large species last about 10 million years. We are way beyond that in that we are distributed all over the whole planet right now. So what should we expect? A million years, 10 million years, more. If that's the case, and if we were to average just a half a billion people, you know, living in, you know, sort of 1800s horse and buggy stuff, we would get to the trillionth

child's, you know, without it. If an asteroid didn't hit us or something, it'd get easily. We hit the, two trillionth child. We might get to five trillion children. As it is right now, there have been a total of maybe a hundred billion humans that have ever existed in history since Homo sapiens started. How many will there be? Why would an intelligent species not primarily care about what the total deep time footprint of that species will be? I don't get it. Because the species is intelligent, not wise, and there's a difference. What if our culture, culture broadly understood your experience with dolphins, that they're self-aware, they have personalities, they have senses of humor, they can communicate all of it.

Would it matter? And I'm afraid to know the answer to that. I would like to think that it would matter. But how many people think beyond this weekend, let alone care about a trillion humans in some distant era or epoch, I think most people are, and it's not their fault, it's our education system and our culture and everything else, but what are your thoughts there? Well, how many people even now care about it? There's the human phenomenon, it's easy to have empathy for an individual, but humans just

don't have empathy for large numbers. Yeah, what if everybody thought dolphins were people? Well, people, you know, humans knew that Native Americans were people, and they still gave them smallpox, blankets. unfortunately. Not everybody did, but you know, we're all reaping the benefits of that, quote, unquote. Hasn't been that long since even the United States that people of a different color could be imported and used as slaves. Unfortunately, it's not aggregate human nature to care about stuff that's outside their own tribe. Having said that, I think that expecting humans and mass to change in a major way is not going to happen anyway.

I think the way change happens is by small groups of folks getting together and individuals having ideas and pressing those. I set up a bunch of seemingly impossible things to do and did I get them all done? No, but I got like 80% of them done. and I'm not, oh, I'm not finished trying yet. It's, I think, not just the way we perceive the world, it needs fixed, it has blind spots, but even once we decide it needs fixed, the way we think about that has blind spots too. And you've long advocated that individuals and small groups are where the action is. And I think cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead had some famous quote that,

individuals and small groups are the only thing that will change the future because they're the only thing that ever had. Can you explain why you think that is the case and why you're an advocate of that? Well, there is no consciousness in a mass of people. You get a million people say, okay, they're conscious in some sense. Well, yeah, they sort of solve problems in some sense, but they're not conscious. It's not an overmind or anything like that. It's, you know, it's akin to an amoeba. At this point, it's an amoeba that's after energy and raw materials to service the, you know, the dopamine and other reward needs of its individual constituents. But there is no understanding going on there.

Whereas individual brains, that's where thoughts happen, you know, it's, and small groups can work together productively. I don't know how far you want me to go. It was interesting to me to go from running the global programs of Greenpeace, which was a fairly rich, very well-known organization with all kind of contacts, and then switching and working on the exact same issues with a very small organization, which, frankly, I ran as an executive just saying, okay, I think this can be done. And, you know, I just generally say, well, you know, I'll give it a try, but there's no way this can happen. But it was enormously more effective. The little group with no money, but that was not, you know, following the game plan of trying to be, you know, an international mega corporation, but just trying to be effective was actually able to solve all of these quasi-impossible things that the big, group wasn't. And I mean, in both cases, I was the person in charge and the same brain was at work. But just by freeing up the sort of strategies and innovation and reaction time and stuff like that,

a bunch of things that had actually been impossible to do as Greenpeace became possible to do with a very small and unknown organization. Yeah, I actually think that we have not really even yet begun to tap what small groups of extremely motivated people might be able to do. Somebody wants to make a difference now, they ask, okay, what can I do? It's like, oh, we'll sign this petition or put solar panels on this house. Or, you know, let's cause universities to divest. So the hedge funds own the oil. And so they have better karma.

The hedge funds own the oil stocks. And it's like, no. those are not things that are going to work. Those are things that affect how you feel. Things that actually reach effective, specific goals in specific ways in defined time scales. That's what effectiveness is. And you can do that. Anybody can do it.

An individual, you don't need to join a group. You can individually decide what is sacred to you. What's your personal mission? And frankly, I think everybody should have a sacred mission. And you don't need to tell anybody else what it is. Just, you know, figure out, go sit alone by yourself, figure out if I always have a sacred mission, what would it be? And maybe it's to follow somebody else.

Or maybe it's to champion a single other species that nobody else cares about. Or maybe it's to save some part of human culture or just to be nice. But it's like, you know, I think this universe doesn't hand out meaning. The physical universe doesn't have meaning. It's this electrochemistry going on inside our brains where the meaning and the color and the love and everything like that live. And people need to focus on that. What is there? And don't just figure out you need to join something.

You know, I think it's very easy for illusory movements to start where people, there's a very low buy-in. It's like, okay, yeah, send five books and you're part of this movement. And, you know, protest here, come to this protest, maybe get arrested. Well, what does that actually do? And in my experience, it doesn't do very damn much. And I can say that as a guy who's, you know, is, by way, I was not a founder of Greenpeace per se. That's only Canada. But I, you know, I founded a bunch of Greenpeace things.

Yeah, Greenpeace Foundation, Greenpeace, USA, Greenpeace International. I did the activist thing for quite a while. And my heart goes out to people who are motivated like that. but just going out and being seen to be striving mightily against the high odds, that doesn't cut it. You know, it's got to be results oriented. It can't just be a lifestyle. It has to be what did your existence on this earth accomplish?

What's the end result? And since we all are causing an impact just by existing in this society, that pretty much dictates that if you want your, you know, your net. impact to be positive, you're going to need to try and accomplish something a lot larger than the scale in which you live. What about all the tens of billions of dollars? I don't know the exact number, but it's huge, dedicated towards environmental protection and climate change and large organizations. And yet we see CO2 and environmental damage just accelerate every year. Is this what you're talking about, that the joining these movements gets you a paycheck and some social cred and perhaps get you laid once in a while

but doesn't actually have results. I'm not trying to cast aspirations. I have great admiration for a lot of folks like this. But really, wake up and smell of coffee people. Our various movements and stuff are failing. Look at the keeling curve. It's going on. I mean, we're failing, you know, full stop.

We need to try something else. I suppose the good news that I might have is that we haven't tried everything. It feels like we've tried everything. There's certainly a lot of disparity young people who will go out and join protests and stuff and then figure, well, that didn't accomplish anything, so nothing can be done. I don't think that's right. I think we're just not approaching it the same way. And it's like, yeah, you can have large movements of people who are convinced that the big problem

and the only problem is that there are sociopaths in charge of fossil fuels. companies. But no, that's not it. We're all demanding those. And the problem with an illusory movement like that is that that epistemological scaffolding is not going to hold up in terms of what we've got coming in coming decades. It's going to crumble down and you're going to have a lot of these same people demanding coal. It's not even holding up right now in Germany and the east coast of the U.S. and other places, energy security is trumping CO2 reduction as a policy. But you and I expect that to get much more intense as the decades unfold. Indeed. And it will. It can't not get more intense. It's a finite, amazing material,

oil in particular. And, you know, basically the last nation with oil wins. And, some seem to understand that better than others now. It's not cleverness via economics. It's, you know, in a very real sense, it's not even just coal. It's mostly oil. And that's why, you know, most of the big wars recently, back World War II, even World War I were mostly about energy. And in fact, even wildlife, coral reefs and stuff like that,

most of the conflicts are about energy. It's like the nature of life, you know, energy is what moves things. And, you know, oil has been this, Avaganza and it's it's finite. I don't actually expect that the you know the proletariat's going to be able to jump on a jet to Disneyland or whatever they have in 100 years. You know, rather than Starship rides to orbit and stuff like that. I think, you know, airliners for the masses are going to be just an urban legend. It's like what if you've got a bunch of reindeer reproducing on an island and there's only a finite amount of food. But it's really the exact same

energetic case. But the reindeer didn't have technology. So it took them longer to die. Okay. So this is something that you and I always struggle with where we try to understand and explain energy and technology to people that largely have a technology lens. Because when you describe the carbon pulse and that we have this giant short-term couple centuries bonanza of fossil carbon and hydrocarbons that's going to deplete, the natural response from people listening is like, okay, well, then we'll use solar panels and renewables and nuclear and things that aren't fossil in nature. So how do you see the relationship between energy and technology and why can't humans replace all this fossil hydrocarbons with technology after fossil fuels deplete?

Technology, as we've come to know it, is really ways of using excess exosomatic energy. And we've had huge amounts of it for the last couple of hundred years and have used more every year. And that is the magic behind technology. That's how you make the little gizmos. That's what the gizmos act to using. So that's excess energy and materials, which are what you make technology with, are exactly what is going away. the we're going to very soon crest the all-time peak in excess extrasomatic energy and we've actually used up most of the geological concentrations of minerals and everything so everything is getting more energetically remote at the same time the total amount of energy that we have to use to do things to get that and make it in the gizmos is declining what what did you mean by energetically remote that's it's a concept that I think it would be great if it was taught by second grade.

It's like energy moves matter or can move matter. It's the only thing that really can move matter. And we move things around in all kinds of ways. And that's, you know, making things worse. But think of like a copper mine. Back when I was a kid, you could dig a hole and come up with big ingots of solid copper. And, you know, it took hardly any energy at all. Now those are all gone.

There's big, huge, yawning open. and pit mines and they're mining or that's got just, you know, tiny fractional percentages of copper. This comes about from using the best stuff first, which is logical, you know, who doesn't want to use the best stuff first? But using the best stuff first, the stuff that's least energetically remote, you know, that you can just pick it up and use it pretty much. Using the best stuff first means that the stuff you have left gets progressively worse. And that's the case with everything that we want to do with energy and technology.

And it's been amazing. I mean, in my lifetime, I would imagine something like 80% of the exosomatic energy of the whole human race has been expended. And we're going to crest the peak soon. And then there will be less every year, year on year, for a couple of centuries. And the way we think about technology now, we're like sort of fish swimming in an energy soup. It's so ubiquitous. We don't question what it would be like without free exosomatic energy. But it's the thing that technology revolves around.

So it'll be going away. I mean, it'll still exist in books. We'll know how to do stuff. But, you know, you're not going to be able to fly a jet from New York to Florida in 100 years. You just won't. So we have not recognized this truism because every year we've had access to more energy. And we can think about, we can envision. having less energy. Actually, there are a few years that we've had less energy. Those would be

recessions and depressions. But we're expecting that to be ongoing in coming decades throughout the coming century. There will be less energy available to humans every year instead of the last century where we had more energy available. Can't technology cushion that blow? Couldn't we be using hopefully no coal, but remaining natural gas and oil towards targeted ways of creating seed corn technology of solar panels and other things that in tandem could provide energy to meet basic human needs on the downslope. In other words, a combination of technology and fossil energy and materials. Absolutely. There are any number of better paths and worse paths. Now, Even the best paths are not going to match up to the Star Trek futures or the things that the neoclassical economics proposed because they're just nuts.

But yeah, there's a huge range. I mean, you see in my house, it's festooned with solar panels. You know, I love them. I think they're a very cool deal. But I look at them as what they are. I have grid tide. I have an off-grid system. And it's interesting.

It's fun. And, you know, there's all sorts of alternate things that can be done. But as I think I mentioned before, we can't power this civilization that we now have that way. We can come up with, you might want to call it, we can land this big civilizational species jumbo jet that's running out of fuel. We can steer it to a nice cornfield to bring it in for a landing where everybody gets off. Or we can just ignore stuff, keep flying over the mountains, and assume the tanks will magically refill themselves. And, you know, there's so there's a metaphor for you. And at this point, we're doing the latter.

So what if we did land on the cord field? What sort of lifestyle would we expect that's more or less sustainable, sometime deep in the future? Well, for one thing, just to get it out of the way, it's not going to have 8 to 10 to 20 billion humans at once. There is a place for billions of humans and trillions of humans, and that's the deep future. That's, you know, and at this point,

they may not end up even being able to be there because we're breaking things. But there is a sustainable level of people that can live for a long time as long as we don't break the planet. And those people, even if they're, you know, energetically poorer and don't have as much material wealth, their life quality could well be better than the life quality that we all have now. Now, they're not going to have air conditioners and stuff like that, but they can be, you know, surfers and poets and farmers and have some level of smart technology that's based on what you can actually make out of what's you got and doesn't require, you know, globe girdling supply chains.

Yeah, there's all kinds of good stuff that can be done. And to some extent, will be, but you can't break the planet. You know, you can't break the oceans. You can't, you know, if you melt all the glaciers, you screw up the monsoons, you're pump, out all of the aquifers and do all the stuff that we're doing, which could go on for hours and discuss that, you're going to break it. You know, we're time blind as well as energy blind. So extrapolating that in the other direction, there is a large, I don't know if large is the

right word. There's a reasonable size movement called the NTE, the near-term extinction movement, that thinks the planet is already broken and that we are in runaway Venus sort of climate change that are not only going to cause humans to eventually go extinct, but that we will go extinct in the next decade or so. And it's surprising to me how many people subscribe to that. What do you think about that? Well, those guys are nut. They're destructively nuts. I mean, they present an attractor that's equivalent to the attractor of, well, there's nothing wrong, because they resolve the dissonance. If you adopt the feeling that, well, there's nothing we can do. It's too late. Go live a

life of excellence. Go, you know, smoke weed, play your banjo, and it's all over, but the shodding. Let's just all blog while we watch the world die. That's horrible. That's terrible. And it's wrong. I remember the head of one of these things was on Jay Hanson's list some years in the past. And at the time, and this was over 10 years ago, he said, oh, within five years,

there's going to be hot enough in my suburban neighborhood to denature proteins. So why not live for the day? Well, this is 10 years later. And what? I'm not sure what neighborhood he lived in, but I doubt it's more than a tiny fraction of a hundredth of a degree different. I think the problem is when people

focus super much, and particularly in the internet, is focus super much, on a certain problem, it acquires a counterfactual immediacy in their brains. And it's like, oh, well, since this all looks bad and we don't know how to fix it, it must be going to happen soon. No, it's not going to happen that soon. The glaciers aren't all going to melt, you know, but that's no reason not to save the planet. A lot of the Earth's system effects that are already locked in are not going to play out for 500 years. That doesn't give us an excuse to not deal with them.

It means that we need to expand our now, what we're responsible for, for the things that we're locking in in the next decade or two that will be irrevocable in coming hundreds of years, such as messing up the seas and screwing up the tropics and killing off the whales and dolphins and yada, yada. Yeah, as you can imagine, I agree with you. When I reach, when I talk to someone who said, well, we're going to go extinct in 10 years because of the positive feedbacks of climate change are certain and near term, I don't entirely disagree with them. If they would say in the next 100 years and there's a chance that this will result in human extinction, I wouldn't disagree. But the fact that they're certain and that it's near term and that there's nothing we can do about it kind of gets my blood pressure up. So what about the general state of climate activism? The reason I ask this is you care about climate and oceans and dolphins more than anything else, to my knowledge. And yet you disagree with the general thrust of the current climate movement.

Can you expand on that a little? This is my first interview in like 20 years. I started out creating organizations and experimenting by intervening. in human systems and in world systems. And, you know, I've only started talking about what I've learned in recent years since I didn't think anybody would ever be interested in listening. Now, there are a few, apparently. But, yeah, the standard activism, which I did, you know, as a, you know, founder of a lot

of Greenpeace campaigns and entities, you know, I live the activist life. But it's very, very incomplete. It has a lot of built-in attractors to mediocrity and ineffectiveness, and that's not to take anything away from people who, you know, want to glue themselves to the wall and after throwing soup on a painting. But it's not a real plan. You know, you need to actually figure out what's going to be effective. And in the real world, that's a stepwise plan where somebody takes personal responsibility on all the steps of the plan. otherwise you just got a bunch of people milling around like a kicked ant hill. And, you know, I love the fact that there are millions of people that have signed petitions and stuff.

But, you know, what kind of a movement really is it if the fundamental thing that ties everybody together is the myth that the transition is going to be easy if we just get the sociopaths away from running the fossil energy companies? No, that's not right. I've actually worked in fossil energy. I was an oil geophysicist for a short time. back in the day and you know people are just people humans are just humans the problem is not that the people were running Exxon maybe sociopaths although that certainly may be true uh from any given time it's that we demand including the people that son exhibitions we demand there to be gasoline we demand there to be you know if we get the notion to cook 10 turkeys in our oven at midnight we demand that

we've flipped that switch and it's going to be there all the time unlimited base load. You know, we're blaming the pushers. And, you know, it doesn't matter. You could put Mother Teresa equivalence at the head of the oil companies. And I guarantee you that the people out there with, with the, you know, the green bumper stickers now at the point those people said, well, I'm going to shut down the oil. We're not going to have it anymore. At the point that people couldn't fill their cars or charge their cars, their houses got cold in the winter and hot in the summer. And they would demand, oh, hey, we need to, on an emergency base, we need basis, we need to start these again.

Which is, you're describing a scenario, but I actually think you're kind of describing the next 10 or 15 years. Well, the next 10 or 15 years, certainly 20 at the outside is when the wheels are going to start coming off, our financial house of cards. And the financial house of cards is in turn, I kind of think of it as like a half-ass, following algorithm for all the mischief that humans like to do. And we'll probably experience, I mean, you've spoken certainly far more, far better on this. As in your, you have a Wall Street background, but we'll probably experience this initially

as financial, fiscal problems, you know, recessions, depressions, and then further on, you know, bank, bank failures and nationalizations of things and rationing and, you know, money, you know, remonetization of some kind, who knows what a dollar will be in 20 years. But this stuff is all coming up because we are really kind of at the inflection point of all-time net energy. This carbon pulse we talked about, okay, the pulse, you know, it's like a sort of a sine wave pulse, and we're at the peak of it now. And it's not even a coincidence that we're near the peak of it, because exponential growth finds the limits really fast. And we're at exponential growth. And about every aspect of what we're doing.

So it's no coincidence that we would live during the period at which things peak and start getting worse because we committed exponential growth and everything. And I think you think what's in five to 15 years, like I said, 20 at the outside. It's not 50 years. 50 years from now, we're not going to recognize things. And yet, everybody from philanthropists to activists, everybody kind of more or less, you know, figure that things are going to be like they have been, and they won't be. What should we be doing as activists or philanthropists or at least thinking about?

Oh, man. There's probably no short answer to that, but align with reality. How about, look, to use the metaphor of NASA launching craft to land on Mars or go wham into asteroids or something. If NASA based the planning of its missions on the level. of mythology and luck and social feedbacks that we do, that we use on everything else and memes, not a single one of their missions would ever succeed. They'd blow up on the pad or they'd go, you know, skewed or they'd, you know, it wouldn't work. Unless you have tight tethers to biophysical

and ecological reality, none of the stuff you do was going to be their right answer. And it's unfortunate. I think it's a shame. There's a lot of well-meaning people. But if 200 years from now, you were to ask whoever is there, what percentage of the philanthropic grants and productive stuff, what

percentage of that in the last couple centuries was wasted? At this point, it would have to be, well, all of it. It was all wasted. At this point, we don't have solar panels that last 200 years, which those guys would probably appreciate. We have solar panels that

last 15 years, maybe 20. Why is that? Because our myths about the way things are going to keep going mean that the net present value of these things are such that why wouldn't we replace them and throw them away in 20 years? Because there'll be better than and maybe cheaper. And so we make stuff that's not meant to last very long. And meanwhile, our bridges are failing. There's not going to be asphalt to maintain the roads. We've torn up the nice, efficient old railways that used to connect all of the cities in the United States. States, you know, in favor. We think what? We're going to use Elon Musk's electric trucks or something. Now, that ain't happening. And anyway. So how much of this is because philanthropists or the general public or activists truly don't

understand reality, as you're describing? And how much of it is that voicing the things that you're saying would go counter to the consensus trance and cause social status. of people in good salary positions in the environmental field, for example. Well, it's both. Reality, particularly the reality, once you've worked yourself into a predicament, as humanity has on this planet, is like the perfect storm for denial. I've been talking about this stuff we're talking about now.

I figure my career has been since mid-70s, and I've actually been in meetings and network philanthropists and stuff like that. And oh my word, I did not get invited back. When I started talking about stuff like this, which was frankly ahead of its time back then, not only was there like crickets after I would talk, but, you know, that network would never invite me back. And even, you know, and still, you know, there's not like people lining up say, hey, DJ, you know, all of these impossible things that you did.

Maybe it would be good to do some more impossible things now. And yeah, there are definitely dynamics that, you know, there are attractors within the human sphere of events and there are repulsors. And the stuff I have to say is full of repulsors. And like I say, I spent a bunch of, I thought I was going to die doing activism, you know, and that's still a part of me. But it became apparent when I didn't burn out like most of the other folks just kept doing this stuff decades after decade. that a lot of the fundamental concepts of how to get things done don't work. Activism is incomplete at best, social activism, and it's full of attractors, as I say, to mediocrity. And that's why there's almost like an ecological progression of starting a new

organization and how the original people will get stuff done and then are gradually replaced. and you end up with a group full of administrators, you know, with budgets in 401Ks that are just part of the background business as usual. You know, you see that cycle again and again. The good news for me is that we haven't really tried being effective yet. It seems like to a lot of people, a lot of the young people I've talked to that, well, what can we possibly do? We've tried everything. No, we haven't. We haven't started even trying stuff.

But it's, you know, the kind of discussion that we do and the way activism is largely done now, it's all cerebral. It doesn't make those deep brainstem connections where you really get human motivation and creativity and you're working against a time limit. And you force yourself to find the answer to situations that are obviously intractively impossible. And you keep doing that. And what you find is that some of the impossible things aren't impossible, but it's a grind. You told me that 12, 15 years ago, and I nodded my head. And I'm not an activist. I'm a teacher.

But I feel the burnout and the constant trying to do things against the societal narrative, you know, 15 years later. So I kind of feel what you're saying, but not fully. So you have had, as I mentioned in the intro, lots of environmental interventions that were successful. And why don't you pick one of those and unpack it or share with us some of the common threads that made you effective, you and your organization effective on those things? Is there some underlying logic or strategy that applies to all of your prior success? assesses. Wow. That covers a lot. I wouldn't say that there's one underlying strategy other than holding myself accountable for large-scale outcomes. In other words, I don't hand anything off to anybody

in terms of responsibility, and that's a horrible thing to put on yourself. And yet, I don't think I'd have succeeded at anything unless I had represented to a bunch of other people that I was going to lead them to do this impossible stuff. And, you know, the stuff did seem impossible and it should have been impossible, but I wasn't bullshitting when I, you know, pulled the people together and said, we're going to do this. It was a commit, it was a life commitment and one that I took seriously. But, okay, I'll give one example, because I think it raises another point, that things that seem intractable, a lot of these campaigns, and pretty much all of the, the things we look at now seem intractable, but there can be deep

simplities, and you don't necessarily learn how to work with those until you've been doing this for quite some time, and it failed a bunch and have figured out why you failed and why others have failed. So I'll briefly compare two campaigns that seem utterly

different, permanently stopping the dolphin drive kill in Taiwan and stopping the oil well fires in Kuwait after Saddam Hussein set them on fire. And both of those campaigns, which succeeded in a very short time, were based upon getting to the issue first, securing the documentary evidence of an appalling thing that was going on, and then converting that to a victory without making the perpetrators seem evil. In other words, I can guarantee that you have never seen,

one of my old friends has never seen the horrible footage of dolphins and whales being killed in Taiwan. It's like nobody has seen the horrible footage of little children in a petrochemical hell under noontime dark in Kuwait, coughing black goo into the street. That's footage. It's right over here. I've got it.

I've seen it. You know, it lives within me in this sort of, you know, existential malaise that I keep going. But the point is, we were able to leverage that stuff. Instead of making our organization popular and getting a bunch of grants by demonizing folks, we went directly to the folks who had the ability to shut it down permanently. And we did. We went to the executive yuan of,

Taiwan did a screening for them and say, help us write the end to this story. And it wasn't just that it eventually happened. We managed to get a kill stopped while half of the dolphins and whales were still in the nets. And the law was changed in Taiwan permanently to the point that within three weeks, we had some of the senators from Executive Yuan in Earthro's wetsuits helping us release the remains of the very dolphins that were being killed. And it was, with boats and flags and stuff like that, and the Buddhist community coming out with banners. And then we seated the local area with teachers talking about dolphins and stuff

for the students for the next few years. And that remains the only, you know, dolphin drive kill that's ever been stopped, national drive kill. So the Kuwait oil campaign was basically the same thing. We were the first ones in there. We got our teams in, well, the scud missiles were still falling. Well, in theory, there was no way to get into Kuwait, and all of the global media was bottled up in Bahrain.

We just simply infiltrated it and got our people in there to do the same thing. We got footage of this horrible stuff going on and managed to screen it before the Al-Sabaz, the Kuwait royal family, and say, hey, you guys, because at that point, they had said that, well, no, these oil fires are, they can only be shut out. by U.S. and British firms. There weren't even any British firms that snuffed oil fires. There were only two in the U.S. did it. So it was projected that this oil was going to gush into the sea

and these flames were going to go on for years and years and years. And that's just the way it was. And we did this and say, look, we've got this footage. We're going to put this out, but you have a chance to help us write the end of this story. Open this up to international teams. And so in other words, it's the same campaign. And so we managed to do that. Now, we not only didn't make any grants on that, but who's going to grant something that you do that fast?

But I actually lost my life savings and retirement income by backstopping the Kuwait campaign. That was hundreds of thousands of dollars. I never saw again because the Kuwait royal family, after agreeing to reimburse it, didn't. So, hey, Kuwait royal family. If you're listening. Yeah, if you're listening. I didn't expect you to tell these stories. The Kuwait story you wrote about in our first book, but I don't think you've ever said the Taiwan

Drive Kill story publicly. So thank you for doing that and thank you for sharing. And I wonder, in listening to this, is part of the reason that you and your and Earth Trust were successful is because you cared more about the outcome and not about the social accolades of telling people of victory. This is some 30 years later that you're finally acknowledging these things and you never got recognition ever for these things in the intervening years. Is that some anti-current social activism dynamic that is important? Well, who in the world strategizes about how to help the quote-unquote bad guys win?

I'll tell you, I mean, just count them off on your finger now. Who is right now trying to help the bad guys win? And it's not a common dynamic. And yet, it's often the best thing. The dolphin-friendly issue, I inserted myself inside the tuna industry, the people who were responsible for literal Holocaust of dolphin. I mean, like seven million dolphins. These are people who I really hated on the level that, you know, a Jewish person would hate the Nazi SS. And yet, I became, in essence, a tuna executive because I had to find a path.

that aligned their interests with what the dolphins needed. And I did that. And your soul dies a little bit when you do things like that. But it's not about me. You know? And that's the first thing I tell students. It's like, it's not about you. It's about what the effect is going to be.

And so I ended up binding Sarciss, the world's largest tuna firm, to via contract law, to the standards by this little Hawaii Incorporated. organization. For eight years, they had to follow our product acquisition standards. That's what made the entire Dolphin Safe thing work. And it was in the background. And it was by helping these guys find a way that they could look good. And I mean, that solution space is, it's not even looked at. And what it means also is you don't have that great hatred gridlock that

that builds support bases and mailing lists and notoriety. But you can come up with things that seem impossible. And we could go hours and hours on things that were impossible on their face and turned out not to be. And I think that's salient because we're facing so many potentially impossible things now that need out-of-the-box thinking. And people are projecting out-of-the-box thinking. So let's go there.

extrapolating from your past successes, what are some of your current projects or ideas for projects to intervene towards better human, planetary, dolphin ocean futures? There are a number of things that I would like to see done and it will do. I think we need a mythological framework for this. It's not just a matter of people blogging and correcting each other and stuff like that. I think there needs to be built the kind of excitement that you get to. around the space community, you know, the Elon Musk groupies and folks like that. And I mean, I'm very connected to the space people and stuff like that. I think that that's very cool when I grew up

liking that. But I think we need to craft some better mythology. I would like, I would like to set up machines to talk to Great Wales. Well, they still exist. I know that's something Azabasca and one of your friends are talking about doing, but his approach and my approach are utterly different. You may recall it. I've built machines for dolphins to use computers and for dolphins to talk to computers and to construct hybrid languages, not just in the abstract, but I mean, have done it for 15 years, ran a lab where dolphins could use a computer to help control their environment if they wanted to. No food reward, no training. It was like, okay, what do you guys want to do with this toy? And, you know, it turns out, getting back to my theme, the dolphins being like people, you know how long it takes a dolphin to learn to use a computer?

About as long as it takes a human, longer than it took my parents. You set it up for them, they use it, and immediately they figure out what it can do. Now, they don't have thumbs, but for instance, I was able to come up with an idea and have a place to build it. The initial thing I do, you've heard John McCaffey, that's sort of a graphic. well, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people have the bulletins on their screen that their MacAfee is expiring. Well, McCaffey actually has expired at this point, but early on, he helped me create a voice recognition board, so dolphins could use phonations to interact with computers. And then half the dolphins didn't want to do that.

So I also created a touch screen with interruptible little lasers that they could interrupt with their restrooms. And so we ended up with a flexible interface to where they could actually do. do things. They could talk to dolphins and other tanks that they couldn't see otherwise. We could actually observe them thinking and acting as dolphins, stuff like that. And it's fascinating to do. Obviously, it's more challenging to do this with great whales, free living and talking under the ice with brains, you know, three, four times the size of ours. But there they are. Here we are in the universe. And here they are with not much time left due to things that we're doing. I'd love to see that happen in my lifetime.

Why did that stop 30 years ago with all the things that McAfee helped you create with the Dolphin computer interface? I haven't heard anything about that other than a couple times you mentioned it to me. Well, you have to figure that when McAfee was involved, or McAfee, that was back in the early days of IBM PCs. Computers, it's got hugely more powerful. And so the boards that he created became quickly outdated. And then we end up using Macs.

And actually the Macs we got were like Steve Wozniak's personal Macs and stuff like that. But we never got funding from Apple, but we were on their web page and stuff like that. And whenever Steve Wozniak was tired of one of his computers, they'd pop that one over to us and stuff like that. So it was interesting. And there were things to do. And there were things that could have really changed the culture about that, too, because it was made for the dolphins. Like we came within a heartbeat of being able to have Japanese students playing video games against dolphins. in real time over the internet.

It was set up. They were doing the dolphins were good at the games. It would have been a nice cultural end run. But when you're doing impossible things and some of the necessary things rest on others, sometimes they don't happen. And in this case, the Marine Life Park worried that one of their dolphins

was going to die on camera or something like that, and they pulled the plug on it. But you've got to try stuff like that. And for all of the success, that you could list, you could probably also list an equal number of things that I tried that seemed impossible. That turned out not to be impossible, but basically didn't work or didn't work exactly the way I would have wanted them to.

And that's it too. You know, trying and failing while doing this stuff, I think, is what qualifies you to try and then succeed more of the time. And how many people are there who have been doing nonstop, you know, conservation intervention since the mid-70s, not many. So given the carbon pulse, given the energy blindness, given the state of climate activism and other activism, what should the head of a environmental pro-future,

pro-social foundation be thinking about, are the priorities out of whack? Is there some path forward that could be both effective and keep them employed and respected in the status quo? I mean, what are some of these super important projects for the next two, three, four decades? Well, it's a good question, and there are a lot of answers to it. But the big thing is take off your neoclassical economics blinders and realize, smell the coffee, about the actual reality that we're heading into.

There are any number of things that we're going into. like human gigafammon. I know nobody else talks about that because I had to make that word up. We're going to see the upslope of the carbon pulse corresponded to what's known as the Green Revolution. Norman Borlaug

is a human population going up like a huskaki stick as well. What's not generally appreciated is that there will be a corresponding downslope. The human population will slash must follow the energy curve back down again.

And that's going to correspond to a lower human carrying capacity. And that, in turn, corresponds to billions of people going away. Now, this could be handled humanely by planning for it in advance. Or it could be handled the way we are planning for it now, which is that, oh, well, everything's going to be fine. Let's go to 15 billion people. And then let's 10 billion of them die off from plagues and starvation. So, gigafammon is a biggie. but there are, you know, so many others.

You need to realize that future people are not going to be rich. They're not going to have, you know, starships. They're not going to be living in space stations. You know, what we have coming up is an Earth Trek. And, you know, there have been no new kinds of energy discovered in the last 100 years. There are a bunch of sentences out there right now. And it seems like anybody who wants to come up with a sentence that seems great, like, oh, solar roadways.

Let's put solar panels on the roads. And wow, yeah, venture capital. Let's get that. There's a bunch of just crazy ideas. They're going to keep coming up. And you and I could be bloody wealthy if we just wanted to get on that train. I think you've called it the tragedy of the energy investing commons. But any nutty thing can now be funded by crowdfunding, but also, you know, get funding from the government or from philanthropists because there's no real, you know, like I say, biogeophysical tether.

There's no reality check. The stuff can be discarded out of hand, be the projects or strategies. And that is a real great sieve to narrow down the things that can be done and should be done. And likely we've got spent fuel rides sitting in swimming pools. So as we saw in Fukushima, if the power goes out until the emergency generators went out of diesel, well, you've got smoking radioactive pits. Okay, those are all over the place because we don't think that will ever happen. There's all kinds of situations in which these discontinuities are going to give us problems.

When people come across the biophysical story of energy depletion, the carbon pulse, a very common initial response is, well, what about nuclear? Nuclear is very energy dense. It seems abundant and orthorium, and it's safe. So why can't we get off of oil and have a nuclear-powered future? Well, here's the thing. If we hadn't had flammable fossil stuff, we never would have had nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons, for that matter. Just like neodymium wind turbines and acres of solar panels and stuff, nuclear reactors are something that you make.

They're mechanisms that you make with fossil energy. They've never been made any other way. There's no indication that they could be made any other way. All of these are renewable. Let's include nuclear with the other renewables. and as long as we're going to have a category that's made up. Yeah, they do work. But, of course, nuclear waste is uniquely poorly suited to a race

that think everything's going to get better and easier forever. So we've still got the fuel rods sitting in pools ready to melt down. And, you know, no real plans to do anything else with it. That's always one of my list of five to ten challenges with nuclear, is the biggest one is we assume that there will be continuity of the human civilized endeavor for centuries or inevitably, because as soon as there is non-continuity, we have all the risk of the 450 nuclear plants and the spent fuel rods and everything else that don't have the energy surplus to hire people and to have the technology and supply chains to continue the remediation and cooling and all that stuff. So it's energy blindness on the back end as well. And of course, the other thing that people don't really look at is if you look at humans energy use, only about

20, 25% of that is electricity. And that's all the solar panels and wind turbines and hydroelectric and nuclear plants and even, you know, if they ever figure out fusion plants, that's all they make. So, yeah, most of what we do can't even in principle be done. You could say, okay, you could remake the entirety of civilization with long extension cords from mineral extraction to ships, everything like that, and batteries and that stuff. But no, you quickly run into materials shortfalls. And really, now time shortfalls. You know, people look at complexity and the continuing availability of things like tritium

and liquid helium, stuff like, that stuff's not going to be available. It just won't be. And regularly, fission will work. And fission plants can last, you know, 50, 100 years, potentially. But you're never going to be able to make a fission plant from the other fission plants. And like I say, even if you electrify the trains and stuff like that,

okay, you're not going to be able to run everything on liquid cars because who's going to be mining the lithiums? They're going to be like a super long extension cord to the lithium mines. there's a belief, I think, out there ubiquitous belief that anything that works on a small scale ever can work on a large scale always. And it's just not the case. You know, there are things that work on the small scale, like orbiting satellites. That does not imply that you can orbit thousands of enormous solar power stations and beam power with microwaves down. But again, trying to sell what's actually possible, both.

physically and thermodynamically possible and probabilistically possible in terms of what sequences of events are, you know, in terms of what that we actually fly in the world that we're in. And, you know, being the bearer of that kind of tidings is something you're very familiar with. So we could probably talk for 10 hours, Don, but on this reintroduction of you to the public, I wanted to have kind of one conversation and we're at the point where I ask, the same questions to all my guests, which I'll now ask you, what recommendations do you have for general listeners of this program who would like to influence the future for the better, but also prepare themselves, their families, their communities for the not too distant

on the horizon, great simplification coming our way. I think my general recommendation is to go find yourself a spot in nature and figure out what your sacred mission is. What has deep meaning to you? And obviously protecting your family does, but is there something beyond that? You know, what would you like your existence to have accomplished, you know, what the points are gone?

At that point, you need to stop listening to what people around you were saying and align yourself with reality. Learn some of this stuff like you talk about, you know. Understand the science synthesis of how you, humans think how our evolutionary programming interacts with energy and ecological realities. I'd say then try and adopt an ethic, what I call it is like a life ethic. It's what is sacred to you? And I don't think, don't, don't shy away from that. I mean, there should be sacred things to us. And there should be things that we can define very

simply as good or evil. An ecological basis for a life ethic. the life is better than the absence of life, you know? And conscious life that can talk across species is preferable to its lack. It's just very basic postulates. And then tie yourself to effectiveness, you know, not just status and the regular thing that humans do, but figure out what it takes to be effective, whatever you decide to do, you know, whether it's choosing a species, and deciding to try and be its savior or saving some cultural thing for the problems that we're going through or a patch of woods near your house or something like that, you know, something larger than yourself.

And take that on and not just advocating for things, but to take personal responsibility for the final outcomes, which can be hard to do, and it seems masochistic, but it's really the only standard that'll get her done. Okay, and refining that advice down, and I know you have given this advice, both in our materials and in person to some students, what suggestions do you have for young humans, 15 to 25 years old who learn about our climate, oceans, energy, economic, political situation, who have their entire lives ahead of them? What advice do you have for young people? Well, largely the same. Except that, one of the things. things I tell them is don't let anybody else guilt you into reproducing. We got some fraught times coming up. My wife and I decided not to reproduce other humans, a little red-headed humans running around with plenty of those. What we decided was that at this point in time, the way to reproduce physically is an endangered species and threatened species. And we have done that. We'll never meet them.

but there's, you know, maybe potentially millions of dolphins and seals and seabirds and turtles and critters like that that are out there that wouldn't have been if we hadn't taken the path that we have. And you're saying that any young person can choose to do that. I think a person of any age, at least try to be a superhero, to try to have an effect on larger scale than themselves. And indeed, just by existing in this society, we have a negative impact on the world. so you have to have an impact larger than yourself if you're not going to be part of the problem. So I think being young now is a real challenge. Of course, it's always a challenge. But we're entering Frodo and, you know, ring to Mordor times.

We literally are on the path to Mordor right now. And whether we walk that path back, that'll be determined on what happens in the coming 20 years or so. You know, a lot of things are going to be locked in. in that period. And this is the most important few decades left. Arguably, some of the decades in the past were even more important, but we didn't get it done that. As I say, any rational appraisal would have to be that we,

as a species, have failed so far for the other species, for our own species, for the distant future, and for the total number of human childhoods there will ever be. we can to some extent turn that around and we're not trying yet i think it's good from time to time reset your what might call your hedonic baseload or whatever the the things that make you happy like we are all wealthy everybody out there including any of you listening you may be on food stamps we're all preposterously wealthy compared to the kings and queens of old we just are but we tend to pay attention to relative wealth, the things that people around us have, but we don't need to do that.

We can live inexpensively and be grateful for the things we have, and we also don't have to envy people that have more. You know, being able to see somebody who's got something that we don't have and be happy for them without trying to own that thing ourselves is, I think, a level of maturity to try and aspire to. And it really will prepare you for the things that are coming. It's like the phrase collapse early and beat the rush. If the things that you truly value are the things that aren't going away, then you're going to have a happier life. So I expect I know what you'll say to this, but what do you care most about in the world, Don? Well, I care about all of it, of course, but deep time there has only been complex life on Earth, animals and plants for a relatively short period.

The Earth is four and a half billion years old. of that time, we've had animals and plants between about $4 billion and $4.5 billion, which is the now. Animals and plants are not going to even be possible after about another half billion years. When the Earth's got to be 5 billion years old, you know, it's just not going to work then. So we've got that window to work in. Why? Oh, a million, a million reasons, you know, the planet's going to get hotter is the biggie. You know, the atmosphere gets stripped away, you know, the carbon dioxide and oxygen can get too low,

eventually you get too little CO2 for photosynthesis. Of course, the sun's getting hotter, the oceans boil away, all of that stuff. So you figure that there's about a billion years for complex life to exist, and that's half over. Of that, the age, if we even call it an age, of conscious self-aware life is barely started. And it could end now with us. And we didn't start it either. The whales and dolphins have had self-awareness long before we, we have had it, but we are, we are in the process of ending them before we end ourselves. So the entire

self-awareness of the universe for itself is at stake. The age of conscious life is hanging in the balance. And I care about that. You know, people talk about life on other worlds and stuff like that. Well, the story of life on earth has been bacterial from the get-go from before the first billion years. And bacteria, it was bacteria up until four billion years. And after, After five billion years, it'll be bacteria again. There's probably bacteria all over the dang place in the universe. But this special combination of things that happen here in a very special way, you know, to make critters whose DNA has accidentally created these virtual worlds that we all live within

and created a bunch of them at the same time. So I could have been friends with an alien mind, you know. I've known an indebted. intelligent alien. I mean, that's amazingly profound. There are aliens with giant brains. We know roughly where they are now, talking under the ice to each other. And we're focused on entirely other stuff. It's like, let's get excited about what we have and what we can still save and kind of infuse our culture if we can with the kind of enthusiast, enthusiasm, that we see for billionaires shooting rockets to Mars.

And by the way, that's not going to happen either. I mean, other than a few poor pitiful folks who die there, maybe. But we need some new compelling mythology. We need to get off our butts. And we need to prepare to be kind of surfers, to surf the weird events that are coming up. When the wheels come off doesn't mean it's the end of everything that can be done, but it means we're going to have to be adaptable.

and, you know, used the skills that got us from, you know, the plains of Africa to where we are now and some near extinction events, some bottleneck events that happened. And, you know, we've got a lot of bottlenecks coming up, certainly biological species of bottlenecks, cultural bottlenecks, in the sense of narrowings that could either close and end or could re-expand again. And it's, like I say, these are Frodo Times, except that. Froto had it easy. So of all the issues that we discussed or maybe other ones that we haven't discussed, what single issue are you most worry about in the near term in the next 10 years or so?

Well, of course, in the next 10 years, me having, it might be turning 72 this week. That will be about the remainder of my life, probably. And I worried that I will live to see everything that I've ever done comes nothing. the dolphins, turtles, seabirds, whales, and stuff that I have temporarily managed to intervene and save, that I will see that they are doomed anyway by the fact that my species just won't stop business as usual, that we are on a path to Mordor and some of the very first casualties are going to be the K-selected species in the oceans, in, you know, 95, 98 percent of Earth's living habitat as the seas, warm up, acidify, the current's slow, it stratifies. We get hydrogen sulfide bubbling up from

methane bacteria in the bottom. That won't play out in my lifetime, which is drawing shorter. It won't play out in the lifetime of your students, but it is something that we will lock in during the lifetimes of people listening to this today. And that's what I most worry about, that despite any temporary successes, that it will all come to nothing. And that's a big worry. In contrast, what gives you hope? What are you most hopeful about in the next decade or so? Well, one of your friends and advisors who was also in earlier would preceded me in the Vancouver Greenpeace Organization was Rex Weiler.

He's talking about a second ecology revolution. We don't need an environmental revolution right now. We don't need to be an environment. I haven't called myself an environmentalist in a long time. we need to have an ecology-based civilization that's energy literate and that, you know, with all its charts don't stop at 2100. Like the IPCC charts that, okay, well, this is what happens to 2100. 2100 has no significance, you know, the things that are going to happen go out hundreds and hundreds a year, maybe thousands of years. So, yeah, young people, but when we restart a second ecology movement, and it's not going to look much like,

activism looks now and it's not going to look like being what an environmentalist is now. It's a matter of adopting a new mythology that is actually anchored to truth because there are great mythologies that are anchored to truth and the sacredness of existence and this wonderful existence we're in. That can be done. The early days of Greenpeace was crazy time, but it was also an inspiring time because back then it was it was about people just balls to the wall going for it and creating a new not just new memes but new drawers in people's mind for concepts that they never would have thought of before like a human being willing to have his head blown up by harpoon to save an individual whale you know symbolism like that is missing now the people who have worked

on my campaigns in the past you know as opposed to burning out i'll run into them 20, 30, 40 years later, and they'll say, you know, that thing that we did, that's the most important thing in my life. That's the thing I wouldn't trade for anything else. And even though I'm old now, if you ever ask again, you'll have me in a minute. And that's the thing. Doing these kind of interventions, even if you don't do it for life, but only do it for a few years, if you do it and succeed, if you know you were part of that impossible thing, there's nothing like it. and it's something that can be aspired to, and it's, you don't always fail. Even the impossible things you don't always fail at, if you actually commit to it as a difficult

thing and not as an easy thing, then a lot of things can be fixed. Now, do I have the answer to our current predicament? No, predicaments don't have easy answers. We don't have problems now. We have a predicament. And it's the hell it is the existential predicament. of our lives and really of a large complex life on our planet. And there will never be another.

You know, you ask about good news. Well, the good news is that if we get past all of these bottlenecks and the planet isn't totally screwed up yet, then any species that are still alive will never be able to get in this trouble again because there's never going to be another carbon pulse and thus never this level of mischief by any species. Well, Don, thank you for your life. of work and over the years I've learned a lot of stuff from you and thank you for

spending your time today with this whirlwind overview of your thinking, your past and your current projects. Do you have any other closing thoughts for our listeners and viewers? Too many. Of the thousands of people that may listen to this, if there are two or three that are actually intrigued by this, drop me an email. You know, I'm here. And investing in individuals and communicating with individuals is an important part of this. And if there's one person who's heard this who decides that they want to have an outsized impact on something, then it will be well worth our time, I think, to do this today. And of the people listen to this, you know, it's, this stuff has predictive value and explanatory value. And the myths don't. You know, Neocross, you know, Neocrosses, classical economics is this wacky series of rules of thumb that was created during a ridiculous period that will never be repeated during which we got free extra stuff every year. And, you know, those rules are going to be obviously nonsense in the future. Except humans are

myth-making and myth-following creatures. So we may continue to follow myths and reject reality for a very long time as a culture. Well, let's make some better myths. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.