Post by Dave on Jul 24, 2012 23:29:59 GMT -5
Can the planet survive 10 billion people?
New Scientist, CultureLab, Tiffany O’Callaghan, editor, 16:38 24 July 2012
www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/07/tiffany-ocallaghan-culturelab-editorbefore-packed.html
Before packed audiences in a petite London theatre, computational scientist Stephen Emmott has been giving a new kind of talk. The brainchild of Emmott and director Katie Mitchell at the Royal Court Theatre, 10 Billion is a daring one man show in which Emmott desperately strives to pull together into one grand and devastating portrait the many ways we are impacting the planet. Standing on a set that he admits eerily resembles his office in Cambridge, UK, where he is the head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, Emmott takes theatregoers on a brisk and bracing tour through our own history and use of Earth’s resources, before offering a glimpse of what the future might look like if the population reaches 10 billion. It isn’t good.
What made you want to do this project?
Principally there were two reasons. One is that these kinds of topics are typically discussed at scientific conferences by and with scientists. Even then, it’s usually just one very specific topic, examined in great detail; no one paints a bigger picture of the situation.
Secondly, outside of the scientific community the only way anyone gets to hear about anything is usually the media. On Radio 4, for example, there’s some 2 minute thing on the Today programme - that ocelots are not breeding this year, or there are not as many bats. And I can just imagine someone saying, “Oh Doris! Bats are in decline! Guess what, ocelots are not breeding this year!” There’s no sort of context to that. There has got to be a better way of communicating. We wanted to give a sense of the scale and the nature of the problems and how they are all interrelated. This is an experiment, to see if it is possible to communicate these sorts of issues to a non-scientific audience in a way that actually makes sense. And hopefully provide a framework for enabling people to think differently about the issues.
Did you decide from the beginning of the project that this wasn’t going to be a play, so much as a one-sided conversation - or did that evolve?
It is pretty much as I envisaged it right from the beginning. Both Katie and I wanted a more conversational style. Katie began by asking, “How do you spend your days?” And I said the vast majority of my days are spent with somebody in my office, whether it’s a PhD student, a post doc, or a colleague. I am standing at a white board drawing graphs, or writing partial bits of equations or just explaining things and discussing things. That’s how I normally talk to people. And she said maybe that type of format was something we should explore.
Your office was very convincing
I didn’t realise that they were going to recreate my office! They did come up and take loads of photos of my office, but I wasn’t expecting them to reproduce it! When they asked to borrow all my journals, I naively thought they were going to flick through a few and they might be useful. That was the only thing for me that was a bit unexpected.
The message of the piece is stark, and filled with stunning but grim statistics. Are you hoping to startle people?
No, the goal was simply to inform and give people an opportunity and a framework for thinking differently about the nature of the problems that we face. You might say it’s quite stark, but 99 per cent of the talk is just the science and the facts. We could solve this problem with massive behaviour change. It’s the only part where I give an opinion - and I hope I’m wrong - but I don’t think we will make the kind of behaviour change necessary.
You also don’t foresee us pulling off any possible technological solutions. Is the outlook that dire?
I remain unconvinced that the case for technologising our way out of this is a strong one. And I do think that behaviour change could solve the problems that we face. But I also have a personal opinion that I don’t think we will choose to do so. I’m not sure that’s that dire, it’s just setting out that we could change this if we change the way we lived -globally, if we have fewer children, if we just live differently. We seem determined to live on a scale that is just not suitable for this planet.
At one point in the talk you suggest that if we learned that an asteroid was going to slam into the planet, the entire world would rally to find a way to avert catastrophe - or set in motion a plan to rebuild if it hit. Why is it so difficult to create a sense of urgency about the problems we ourselves are causing?
If astronomers and physicists actually discovered an asteroid, it’s a pretty simple problem: there’s a very large object hurtling up to earth and it’s going to slam into the planet. That’s pretty easy to understand. The complexity of this problem, that the inhabitants of the planet are gradually having the same impact for reasons that are all highly interconnected and complex, is harder to grasp. I also believe that as a species we tend to be either optimistic or want to just ignore problems until they stare us in the face. And this isn’t staring us in the face. It’s immensely appealing to want to believe that this isn’t a problem on this scale, or that even if it is, that we will figure out a way to stop it.
Of the many figures you point to, you highlight the fact that a single Google search uses nearly as much energy as boiling a kettle. Are you hoping to get people to reconsider all aspects of how we consume?
That is the thing I’m trying to convey. It isn’t, if I get rid of my Range Rover and buy a Prius, job done. It isn’t just about switching off your mobile phone charger at night. It is much more fundamental than that, about the rate at which we consume, the kinds of things which we consume.
Even with 7 billion of us, there are already several billion people on this planet who quite understandably look at the way in which Europeans and Americans live and think, I would like to live like that. But as many of these countries start to become more populous and prosperous, they are just going to add to the problem. I just don’t know what the solution is, really, other than behaviour change.
You say that by behaviour change you don’t mean small gestures but bigger, more fundamental shifts. How do you want to bring about this revolution?
It is a really difficult question to answer, because I don’t think the problem is that one dimensional that you can just list some prescriptive set of things that will solve it. You use a word that I think is required here, and that is a revolution in the way economies work, in the way governments do their job, and as a sense of collective responsibility as citizens rather than individual responsibility. Bringing about that kind of change is outside the domain of scientific expertise. That is the domain of politicians and economists and perhaps philosophers.
I may not be able to make a contribution to behaviour change, other than my own, unless this talk somehow miraculously makes some contribution! If the message of the talk did act as a catalyst to galvanise people into action and get them to talk of government action, then that would be fantastic.
You call yourself a rational pessimist, but it seems you are leaving room for hope?
Although I don’t think we can technologise our way out of this currently, my lab is nonetheless working on things like artificial photosynthesis and technologies to enable a new food revolution. So, despite the fact that I do have my own views, I also have a responsibility as a scientist to do my best to try to make a contribution to solving some of those problems. So no, I obviously haven’t given up hope because I am working on some of the things that might help solve this.
New Scientist, CultureLab, Tiffany O’Callaghan, editor, 16:38 24 July 2012
www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/07/tiffany-ocallaghan-culturelab-editorbefore-packed.html
Before packed audiences in a petite London theatre, computational scientist Stephen Emmott has been giving a new kind of talk. The brainchild of Emmott and director Katie Mitchell at the Royal Court Theatre, 10 Billion is a daring one man show in which Emmott desperately strives to pull together into one grand and devastating portrait the many ways we are impacting the planet. Standing on a set that he admits eerily resembles his office in Cambridge, UK, where he is the head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, Emmott takes theatregoers on a brisk and bracing tour through our own history and use of Earth’s resources, before offering a glimpse of what the future might look like if the population reaches 10 billion. It isn’t good.
What made you want to do this project?
Principally there were two reasons. One is that these kinds of topics are typically discussed at scientific conferences by and with scientists. Even then, it’s usually just one very specific topic, examined in great detail; no one paints a bigger picture of the situation.
Secondly, outside of the scientific community the only way anyone gets to hear about anything is usually the media. On Radio 4, for example, there’s some 2 minute thing on the Today programme - that ocelots are not breeding this year, or there are not as many bats. And I can just imagine someone saying, “Oh Doris! Bats are in decline! Guess what, ocelots are not breeding this year!” There’s no sort of context to that. There has got to be a better way of communicating. We wanted to give a sense of the scale and the nature of the problems and how they are all interrelated. This is an experiment, to see if it is possible to communicate these sorts of issues to a non-scientific audience in a way that actually makes sense. And hopefully provide a framework for enabling people to think differently about the issues.
Did you decide from the beginning of the project that this wasn’t going to be a play, so much as a one-sided conversation - or did that evolve?
It is pretty much as I envisaged it right from the beginning. Both Katie and I wanted a more conversational style. Katie began by asking, “How do you spend your days?” And I said the vast majority of my days are spent with somebody in my office, whether it’s a PhD student, a post doc, or a colleague. I am standing at a white board drawing graphs, or writing partial bits of equations or just explaining things and discussing things. That’s how I normally talk to people. And she said maybe that type of format was something we should explore.
Your office was very convincing
I didn’t realise that they were going to recreate my office! They did come up and take loads of photos of my office, but I wasn’t expecting them to reproduce it! When they asked to borrow all my journals, I naively thought they were going to flick through a few and they might be useful. That was the only thing for me that was a bit unexpected.
The message of the piece is stark, and filled with stunning but grim statistics. Are you hoping to startle people?
No, the goal was simply to inform and give people an opportunity and a framework for thinking differently about the nature of the problems that we face. You might say it’s quite stark, but 99 per cent of the talk is just the science and the facts. We could solve this problem with massive behaviour change. It’s the only part where I give an opinion - and I hope I’m wrong - but I don’t think we will make the kind of behaviour change necessary.
You also don’t foresee us pulling off any possible technological solutions. Is the outlook that dire?
I remain unconvinced that the case for technologising our way out of this is a strong one. And I do think that behaviour change could solve the problems that we face. But I also have a personal opinion that I don’t think we will choose to do so. I’m not sure that’s that dire, it’s just setting out that we could change this if we change the way we lived -globally, if we have fewer children, if we just live differently. We seem determined to live on a scale that is just not suitable for this planet.
At one point in the talk you suggest that if we learned that an asteroid was going to slam into the planet, the entire world would rally to find a way to avert catastrophe - or set in motion a plan to rebuild if it hit. Why is it so difficult to create a sense of urgency about the problems we ourselves are causing?
If astronomers and physicists actually discovered an asteroid, it’s a pretty simple problem: there’s a very large object hurtling up to earth and it’s going to slam into the planet. That’s pretty easy to understand. The complexity of this problem, that the inhabitants of the planet are gradually having the same impact for reasons that are all highly interconnected and complex, is harder to grasp. I also believe that as a species we tend to be either optimistic or want to just ignore problems until they stare us in the face. And this isn’t staring us in the face. It’s immensely appealing to want to believe that this isn’t a problem on this scale, or that even if it is, that we will figure out a way to stop it.
Of the many figures you point to, you highlight the fact that a single Google search uses nearly as much energy as boiling a kettle. Are you hoping to get people to reconsider all aspects of how we consume?
That is the thing I’m trying to convey. It isn’t, if I get rid of my Range Rover and buy a Prius, job done. It isn’t just about switching off your mobile phone charger at night. It is much more fundamental than that, about the rate at which we consume, the kinds of things which we consume.
Even with 7 billion of us, there are already several billion people on this planet who quite understandably look at the way in which Europeans and Americans live and think, I would like to live like that. But as many of these countries start to become more populous and prosperous, they are just going to add to the problem. I just don’t know what the solution is, really, other than behaviour change.
You say that by behaviour change you don’t mean small gestures but bigger, more fundamental shifts. How do you want to bring about this revolution?
It is a really difficult question to answer, because I don’t think the problem is that one dimensional that you can just list some prescriptive set of things that will solve it. You use a word that I think is required here, and that is a revolution in the way economies work, in the way governments do their job, and as a sense of collective responsibility as citizens rather than individual responsibility. Bringing about that kind of change is outside the domain of scientific expertise. That is the domain of politicians and economists and perhaps philosophers.
I may not be able to make a contribution to behaviour change, other than my own, unless this talk somehow miraculously makes some contribution! If the message of the talk did act as a catalyst to galvanise people into action and get them to talk of government action, then that would be fantastic.
You call yourself a rational pessimist, but it seems you are leaving room for hope?
Although I don’t think we can technologise our way out of this currently, my lab is nonetheless working on things like artificial photosynthesis and technologies to enable a new food revolution. So, despite the fact that I do have my own views, I also have a responsibility as a scientist to do my best to try to make a contribution to solving some of those problems. So no, I obviously haven’t given up hope because I am working on some of the things that might help solve this.