Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the Free Range Podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the Program on Law Communities and the Environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is prize winning journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert, her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Her most recent book is, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, which was published last year. Hi, Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining me today.
Elizabeth Kolbert 0:40
Thanks for having me.
Michael Livermore 0:41
So, you know, I thought I thought we could kind of get started by zooming out a little bit, you know, you’ve you’ve had a wonderful career as an environmental journalist and writer over some time. And I thought, you know, I was curious to hear a little bit from you about how just the field of journalism has changed and developed over the course of your career, specifically, kind of environmental journalism. And, you know, what, some of the, the good things that have developed in that period of time and what some of the downsides have been?
Elizabeth Kolbert 1:14
Well, you know, as they say, I’m old enough to remember when, you know, when I started out, I was really I started out in journalism, I wouldn’t say in environmental journalism I, I started out at the times really doing political reporting in the 80s. And, you know, this was before anyone had, or anyone in the wide world had really even heard about the web or conceived of it. So everything was either you know, in print, or on the radio or on TV, and the channels of communication were pretty clear. And, you know, that has obviously changed really dramatically over time. And I think that has had certain, you know, positive effects, obviously, that we now get a lot can get a lot of information from all around the world, you know, if I, if I want to, I can read newspapers from all around the world, watch TV, sometimes from all around the world. But, you know, it’s also had the effect of, on the one hand, really hollowing out, you know, what we would call the sort of mainstream media, it is very difficult to have the economics have completely changed, very difficult to make them work. I think that’s been, you know, very hard on projects that are expensive to do, which newspapers like the times, which I worked for, for many years in the New Yorker, and all the publications people are familiar with, you know, used to sponsor, you know, it’s that’s getting tougher and tougher. So I think that’s a that’s a loss, I will say, and I think that, you know, I have nothing that your listeners don’t know, but obviously, the way the web has become a font, not just of information, but of misinformation. I don’t know that anyone who idealistically thought of you know, information, wanting to be free also thought of disinformation to be free, but that I think has, you know, really radically transformed our politics in ways that, you know, I think, is very dangerous, how’s that?
Michael Livermore 3:38
Yeah, yeah. I saw from your bio that you had spent some time in, in Albany working for the times as the bureau chief there in the early 1990s. And I actually spent some time in Albany working for environmental advocacy groups. And I remember a little bit later than that, but but in the in the late 90s, early 2000s. And at that time, you still met face to face with people, you know, when you, you would chat with a reporter, you know, like a notebook would come out. And folks would take shorthand, and it was such a, I don’t know, it was just a very different experience. And then these days where so much is done over email, and it’s a very quick, it’s much less of a face to face relationship, but but for your work, it seems that you’re still able to carve out a lot of time to chat with people individually, and you know, go on location and really kind of immerse yourself in, in this work, which is, which is really wonderful. And I wonder if you think more generally, again, kind of in the profession, something is lost when when everything is just kind of converted over to, you know, screen time and you don’t get out of the office and you don’t build those kinds of personal relationships.
Elizabeth Kolbert 4:48
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, I think one of the problems that we have with journalism now and it’s both built into the cost structure and it’s built into the web structure, and it’s built into everything being done remotely now, or a lot of things being done remotely now is just everything gets recycled, and you don’t get I think, you know, I’m not sure where people even get their ideas. But as you’re alluding to, I assume, going to the LCA room, which was the Legislative Correspondents Association, in the New York State Capitol, which, you know, most people have never been to, but it was a wonderful sort of place, it was simply, it had a lot of lore to it, there are old poker hands on the wall that the reporters had put up, and I don’t want to, you know, sort of romanticize the days of, you know, the guys playing poker up on the shelf. But I think that, you know, I don’t know how young reporters now starting out, you know, especially during COVID, obviously, you know, one had sources is that, is that good or bad? You know, that’s sort of the way journalism has always worked. I don’t honestly know exactly how the LCA functions these days.
Michael Livermore 6:07
Ya know, it’s, you know, at least aesthetically, it seems something’s lost, but you’re right. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s also important that to nostalgia as the past, but you still get out into the field quite a bit. So you, it seems like in any case, so it’s, it seems like that remains an important part of how you how you do your work?
Elizabeth Kolbert 6:27
Well, I mean, when you do a longer form piece, you know, for The New Yorker, or really, almost any publication, it’s pretty hard to do it completely, unless it’s, you know, what we would in the journalism is called a think piece where you’re just sort of taking an issue and, and, you know, thinking about it, or talking to people who are thinking about it, if you’re really reporting a story that has, you know, people sort of moving through place and time, you almost you have to get out there. And that, that is where I think, you know, the, what, you know, the value of long form journalism, but it does get back to the point I was making before that, that’s getting harder and harder to support both the time and the travel, you know, it’s expensive. And so, that’s why I think we see, you know, more and more, well, we see two things, you know, one, we just see more and more sort of recycled content, something gets written, and it just gets, you know, blasted everywhere. And that’s not really very useful in my view. But, you know, you also are seeing people trying to come up with creative ways, like, you know, sort of nonprofit journalism, trying to figure out ways to support serious journalism without the economic, you know, in the absence of the economic model that that had worked for quite a while,
Michael Livermore 7:52
ya know, we’ll see, we’ll see, you know, how that all goes in the future, that certainly the trend line is, as just put an enormous amount of pressure on on the industry, but, but other things, you know, like, again, as you said, the internet makes it a lot easier for folks to, to certain types of research and communicate with a broader audience. So maybe just transitioning over to, to your recent book Under a White Sky. You know, in a sense, a book like that could have been written, you know, very abstractly, you know, there have been versions of some of the themes that you talked about in that in that book, that are written very abstractly, but obviously, in that, in the book, really, you’re collecting these stories, at a, you know, a very kind of ground level, and that makes it all extremely compelling. I guess very abstractly, it’s, you know, the way I read is a kind of a book about unintended consequences, and, and also tragic choices and in different ways that people relate to the environment. And there’s a bunch of really just extraordinarily interesting, individual stories there. One that kind of caught my attention, I’m sure, many other readers is, is the is the story on gene drives, which are really just a fascinating topic. I think there’s just a whiz bang element to gene drives, and just the incredible kind of science and engineering behind it, but also some of the, obviously, the environmental challenges and risks that you talked about in the book. But one of the things that kind of strikes me about that particular case, is there’s just this element of a tragic choice to the, to the technology because on the one hand, it carries these risks, like really serious risks. On the other hand, you know, we could be talking about a technology that could end malaria, which would have just absolutely staggering benefits for human wellbeing. So when you were kind of doing research on that, what struck you about about in particular kind of gene drives and, and the story that they can or what they tell us more broadly about humans and interactions with the environment.
Elizabeth Kolbert 10:02
Well, I guess I’ll start by sort of explaining what gene drive is, and then we can go from there. So gene drive occurs naturally, it just means genes that have figured out a way to evade the normal rules of heredity. Whereby, if you’re a gene, and I should say you’re really a gene variant, or an out allele, as the geneticists would say, you will get passed down 50 50% of the time, so So you’d, you know, sort of tend to dilute over time, if you do gene if you have gene drive. And as I say, there are many, many natural gene drives, or driving genes, I guess they’d be called, you get passed on more than 50% of the time, you’ve figured out a way to, you know, sort of get your genetic material into the next generation, more than 50% of the time. And synthetic gene drive, which is what you and I are talking about, means that you basically use this new kind of gene editing tool known as CRISPR, you basically program the organism, you programmed the gene, to get passed along on along with the instructions to get passed along more than 50% of the time, how’s that and, you know, in theory, you could get passed on 100% of the time. And that’s very, very powerful. If you’re trying to genetically engineer something, and then pass that trade down, obviously, and the gene drive, the kind of gene drive that you’re talking about with malaria, malaria carrying mosquitoes is called a suppression drive. And what you would do is you actually build in a, some kind of something that interferes with reproduction, usually, and, you know, in the normal course of events, obviously, if you had such a dangerous and damaging gene variant, it would drop out of the gene pool, but instead it spreads using gene drive, and eventually the population crashes. That’s the idea. And these gene drive mosquitoes exist in lab tests, they have, you know, populations crash, just as predicted. They’re in very high secure facilities in Italy right now. I think that the question of an end, they’ve also there’s a lot of talk, talk at this point of, could you use it for conservation purposes, that’s what I look at in the book, for example, to eliminate invasive rodents on islands, for example. Now, the problem with the technology, you know, the good thing about the technology is it’s incredibly powerful. And the problem with a technology is that it’s incredibly powerful, right? And so, you know, the people, some people who were among the earliest people to do gene drive organisms have really renounced it. I mean, it’s like, you know, it’s a little bit like inventing the atom bomb, you know, do you really want this out in the world? And we haven’t answered that question. Honestly, we and I think one of the sort of themes of Under the White Sky is that we are extremely technologically proficient. But you know, our ethics and our politics are, can’t keep up with our technology. So we have these very powerful technologies that we don’t really know what to do with, because we are pretty bad at governing them and controlling them. And so, you know, whether gene drive should forever remain in a lab or not, is a pretty profound question that we lack even sort of the mechanisms to answer.
Michael Livermore 13:43
Yeah, yeah, just speaking of the kind of the political, cultural, moral failures associate with these, one of the things that just strikes me about the particular the malaria cases, I suspect that if we, you know, had very serious malaria happening in Europe or the United States, this debate would have been over and we would have, we would have actually engaged in this, the technology would be out, we will be using it. It’s
Elizabeth Kolbert 14:13
possible, but I do I do want to say that. i Well, there’s two, two points that I’ll raise. First of all, the Europeans are very, you know, the Europeans. And this shows a split. You know, the Europeans are very anti genetically modified crops, we eat, you know, everything, all our corn, all our soy virtually is GMO at this point. And we even people who are anti GMOs are eating it, you know, is as the fact of the matter. Now, you know, for better or worse, and the Europeans have really blocked that in doing so. They’ve really blocked a lot of other countries from doing it too, because they don’t take exports of GMOs. So you know, I don’t know that we can say either No, you know, by a lot of people’s accounts, GMOs are absolutely crucial to feeding the world. So I’m not sure that we, I don’t know, I don’t know what reaction would be has that. But that but you raise an interesting point, A and B, I do have to put one sort of caveat in here, which is having not released these things into the world. You know, there’s a lot of questions about whether, you know, they will work out in the world you’re encountering, you know, you’re putting unbelievable selective pressure on the organisms that genetically sort of figure out a way to evade this rate. If you’re trying to make the population crash. Well, if I have a new mutation that allows me to subvert this, then I am going to be incredibly successful. So it’s not clear whether you know, when lab technology meets the real world of mosquitoes, that this will work to be honest.
Michael Livermore 16:03
Yeah, yeah, I should, I should be clear to just because I think the Europeans, or the US would, would use the technology. If, you know, if we, if we face the threat doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s a good idea.
Elizabeth Kolbert 16:15
I hear I hear you completely. And I think that it will be a very interesting question. I think, you know, it. Definitely, you know, the idea is to release them in Africa, where there are high malaria rates, and whether, and, you know, obviously has to be done in consultation with the people on on the ground, and whether they will welcome it, or revile it, you know, is that we haven’t even gotten there yet.
Michael Livermore 16:48
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, just to reiterate, the point that you make is that, you know, once you put genes into the world, it’s really unclear what will happen with them, you have cross, you can have crossover, you can obviously, as you said, there’s an incredible amount of pressure. And if you have a small mutation, which is going to happen, I mean, mutations happen, that we know. And so, yeah, it’s a very tricky thing.
Elizabeth Kolbert 17:12
I mean, it’s a very risky technology, if it works, it’s potentially even a risky technology, if it only partly works. But it also is a very, you know, you know, Life finds a way as they say, and, as Michael Creighton said, and I don’t, I think, I think if you know, I think if a fair number of of biochemist or molecular biologists are, are somewhat skeptical that you could really, you could maybe do it in a very small controlled space, you know, but where there’s a lot of movement, and mosquitoes are, you know, pretty mobile, whether you could really whether it would really work or whether you you know, just getting new populations coming in. Yeah.
Michael Livermore 18:04
So, another technology that you kind of talked about towards the end of the book is geoengineering and I don’t know, at some level, if if you’re interested in all of these technologies independently, or if there’s, in a sense, there’s something of each of them are a metaphor for the for the risks of geoengineering. But maybe we could just kind of introduce the the geoengineering, that you’re that you’re interested in and explored in the book. And then what I always think is kind of the most frightening prospect with with geoengineering is kind of think of as like, the spring action, you know, are kind of what happens if we stop geoengineering, basically. And that kind of consequences of that. So. So maybe just one question was, was geoengineering the thing that kind of brought you broadly to the to the theme of the book? Or did it happen naturally? And then, you know, maybe we could talk about geoengineering specifically a little bit?
Elizabeth Kolbert 18:59
Well, the book emerged sort of out of this question of what are we going to do, you know, we have more and more ways in which we realize that, you know, we, we are dominating natural systems, and we don’t like the results of that. And, you know, gene drive is one example of technology you could use to try to assert a new form of control over over a biological system. You know, definitely the stories in the in the book are sort of fables, they are fables. They are, you know, they could have could be the details could be very different. But the idea that, you know, sort of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that you think you’re, you know, you think you’re going to control something things get out of control. That that’s definitely you know, the theme of the book. Oh, Um, and definitely geoengineering was always going to be the ultimate, you know, sort of example of that. Yes.
Michael Livermore 20:08
So, so, you know, there’s a couple of different technologies that folks that folks talk about, there’s the, you know, shooting mirrors into space, there’s, you know, placing various kinds of chemicals in the upper atmosphere. So obviously, there’s two things, we should say there’s two different general types of geoengineering, there’s sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, which is usually understood to be quite a bit less dangerous. And then there’s the solar reflectivity stuff of reducing the amount of solar radiation that makes its way to the Earth’s surface. So it’s really the latter that, that you talked about both in the book, but it’s really the latter that raises this kind of Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem.
Elizabeth Kolbert 20:43
Yeah, I mean, they both I mean, I think that the the first kind of second carbon out of the air is sort of left the realm of geoengineering these days is more referred to as carbon dioxide removal or negative emissions. And the interesting thing about that, and I would just raise, because I do think it’s very significant, and you’re going to people are going to be hearing more and more about it is that, you know, we don’t have technologies that can do this at large scales at this point, you know, with any kind of economic or, you know, energetic efficiency. But we’re depending on them already, they’re sort of built into the calculations of the IPCC of the UN of like, how we’re going to stay, you know, even below two degrees C, which is considered, you know, limit, you definitely don’t want to pass. So, we have the cold conversation around climate change, to the extent that, you know, there is a conversation around climate change. It’s already in there. And I think that that is a sign really a sign of just how insane our world is right now. To be frank. Okay, so that’s, so that’s one thing, so do visit this very small project in Iceland, where they are removing carbon from the air segment out of the air and converting it into rock, which is a very, you know, sounds quite cool, and is quite cool, but takes energy. So then there’s the precedent of okay, well, you know, why are we doing this, when we, you know, basically are putting up carbon to produce energy. So it’s kind of got this weird circular logic. So that is one chapter. And then then the ultimate geoengineering, solar geo engineering, which, as you say, involves literally blocking, dimming the sun, you know, having less direct sunlight hit the earth. And the way that that’s usually the mirrors in space is kind of a futuristic concept. And perhaps, you know, we’ll get there, I don’t think in our lifetimes, but more kind of plausible right now is, you would mimic volcanoes, volcanic eruptions, put a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, very major eruption. And we have, you know, very good evidence from previous volcanic eruptions, that that cools the earth, that the sulfur dioxide forms these little droplets that are very reflective, and they reflect sunlight back to space, and you get a temporary cooling effect. And if you just kept replenishing, that, you could give us you know, sort of a semi permanent cooling effect. Now, you know, the problems with this are, you know, Myriad. And they range from, you know, changing the color of the sky. That’s why the book is called white sky, to potentially changing regional weather patterns messing around with the monsoons. And, you know, so it raises a tremendous number of questions. Now, the the problem is, and this gets back to how messed up our world is, you can’t measure geoengineering the risks of geoengineering against the risks of a stable climate, you have to measure them against the risks of the way we’re already messing with the climate, which is super profound, you know, I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s really serious what we’re doing. So, you know, are we going to reach a point where we’re going to say, well, you know, this is so bad, what we’ve got is so bad. We’re going to have to try geoengineering. I fear that’s not impossible.
Michael Livermore 24:26
Oh, yeah. I mean, and then the, you know, so look attractive, I think, for a lot of folks. I mean, there are some economically minded people in the world who would say, Well, wait a second, what are the costs of this geoengineering enterprise? You know, it’s just a flying a few jets around and you know, decarbonizing the whole global economy is a lot more expensive. So why haven’t we been talking about this the whole time?
Elizabeth Kolbert 24:51
Yeah, do you think I mean, if we get into that situation, then we are really and truly screwed up Can’t geoengineer your way out of perpetual carbon emissions? Or if you do, you are really talking about putting a lot of stuff into the stratosphere, you’re really, you know, carbon dioxide emissions are cumulative, right. So they stay up there a long time. If you keep emitting carbon at anywhere near the rate that we are doing, or, you know, you have to keep ratcheting up what you’re putting in the stratosphere. So any sort of semi responsible geoengineering plan involves getting to net zero, but using geoengineering as a kind of palliative, you know, for that time, when you reach peak heat, if that makes sense. To cut the top off of that peaky, if you keep on if you think if you think and I’m sure there are people out there who are thinking this, but they are wrong, if you think you’re going to just merrily go along, you know, emitting carbon and then counteract that with geoengineering, then you are basically looking at a world that it will be, you know, unrecognizable,
Michael Livermore 26:09
it would also be very, very sensitive, I think this is an argument you raised in the book, and I’ve heard elsewhere, which is, this is what you’re talking about, it’s imagine that kind of long term, not you what you’re talking about, but what the proponent in here is talking about is an extraordinarily long, let me make indefinite technological project of, you know, running the solar management operation, that would be extremely risky, it would be resource intensive. And it would have to constantly be maintained. And so we will be signing ourselves up for for this project, that is no precedent in human history. And what we do see lots of precedents for in human history are things like, really bad pandemics, and wars and other sources of conflict that could interfere with our ability to carry out said long term massive global scale project and, you know, just imagining, you know, a state that says, you know, what, you know, I’m not happy with the sanctions that are being issued against me, based on my, my actions. And so if you guys don’t get rid of the sanctions, I’m going to start shooting down these planes or, or kind of whatever could happen. And if that happens, there’s kind of the nightmare scenario.
Elizabeth Kolbert 27:28
Yeah. And I think that this, you know, that the the war in Ukraine has, you know, really, I mean, I haven’t spoken to any of the and I want to say there are very few people who would call themselves proponents of geoengineering at this point, I guess they would call themselves proponents of researching geoengineering. But, you know, there there, there was, there was is work going on, you know, we get back to the office of this question of governance, you know, we can’t get our act together to cut carbon emissions, how can we get our act together to geoengineer, and I think that, you know, this notion that the world was a stable place, at least among the sort of superpowers has been shattered. That raises that makes it harder, you know, to to imagine, as you would say, this collective project. Now, there are people to I will say, and, and I think it’s a very reasonable argument, who would say, Well, you can never, you know, `even even before the war in Ukraine, you know, committing future generations to this kind of project that’s not, you know, not ethical, not viable, whatever. But, you know, on the flip side, you could say, well, we’re committing them to a world of, you know, melting the Greenland ice sheet, is that ethical? Is that viable? You know, so, so these conversations, you know, I guess another theme of androids would be, you know, we’ve kind of run out of the good choices, we’ve run through those, because we failed to act in a timely way. And COVID, you know, is is very, very good analogy here, too. You know, we ran out of good choices. Now we only have, you know, bad and worse choices in a way.
Michael Livermore 29:23
Right. And one of the things I appreciate about the book in particular is that the the end you you kind of refuse to do the happy ending. You kind of explicitly say, I’m not doing that even though you know, there are climate communications people that would balk and say, no, no, you have to leave people with a sense of hope. But also just think reckoning with the situation that we’re in and realizing it. I personally think that that’s extraordinarily important message as well. But I suspect you’ve probably taken heat from some of the some of the climate communications people, but just I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. Maybe the kind of just final question is as someone you know, you’ve been A close observer of these issues for for some time now. And it can, it can get very, very frustrating. And it can get depressing. And obviously, this is an issue that happens with advocates that happens with scientists and habits with journalists. And so we, you know, I do think people often need some source of energy, even if it’s not going to be kind of delusional optimism. And so I guess my final question is kind of where do you where does that source of energy come from? For you? Maybe it could be anger, it could be it could be lots of different things.
Elizabeth Kolbert 30:31
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there’s, there’s, as you say, there’s a lot of debate in the climate communications world, which I don’t really see myself in, you know, I’m an IC, myself, I’m a journalist, we don’t control how people respond to, you know, the facts. We, our obligation is to the facts. Now, you know, I think, what motivates me to a certain extent, and, you know, maybe this is just my personality type, or whatever it is, is, you know, a certain amount of panic. And I think panic can be a motivating force, and people should be panicking right now. It’s just really, you know, we are on a glide path to a very hellish future, anyone you know, who is, you know, under 40, or 50, or whatever, should be worried, and anyone who has kids who are under 40, or 50, should be, you know, very worried, and that, that should be motivating. What do we do for our kids, you know, all the things that, that we all spend our time worrying about. For our kids, you know, where they’re going to go to school, you know, did they make the soccer team blah, blah, blah? Well, you know, are they going to have a planet to live on that that should be the motivating force here? Yeah.
Michael Livermore 31:46
So I wouldn’t normally say ending on the note of panic, exactly. optimistic, but you know, whatever context is all right. That’s right. Well, thanks so much for joining me for this conversation. I really appreciated the chance to chat with you today.
Elizabeth Kolbert 32:01
Oh, thanks for having me.
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