what evening from los angeles. i'm tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation about the state of our planet with elizabeth kolbert. her latest is titled "the sixth extinction." then we will turn to a conversation with comedian greg edwards. he is something of an internet sensation with a video site called "thug notes." which distills some of the world's greatest literature through the hip-hop generation. those conversations are coming up right now.

yourd by contributions to pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. have been five ethics where a catastrophic event has wiped out life on earth. the most recent was caused by an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. now, best-selling author elizabeth kolbert says we are living in another -- in the middle of another mass

extinction caused by human activity. her tone is called "the sixth extinction." it is the result of years of research. but to have you on this program. with this notion of why there is still so much today. you have scientists, researchers, best-selling texts about the reality of what we are enduring today. yet on capitol hill and beyond -- this obviously connects the politics -- or is still so much debate. depending on what point of view one wants to hear, one can find a congressman, senator, president that will support your point of view. >> in the scientific world, there is virtually no debate over certain things. for example, that we are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. at the hearte is

of this. it is not the only way we are changing the planet but it is a major way. you just don't find anyone to debate that. carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. it has a property of warming the planet. why we are still debating this on a political label seems inconvenient. it is politically inconvenient for us to acknowledge this because a lot of changes would be necessary. as soon as you acknowledge that we are changing the planet, then the next thing is, what do we do about it? there are a lot of vested interests that preferred things the way they are. we will come back to the science. i want to get to this first point about the politics. with all the work you have done and others have done to make

clear what the science is telling us, if we cannot make the research come to light -- to have a real debate on the floor of the house, have a real debate inside the white house about what to do about this, then what does it really matter? my question is, you have done all the work here, but if people don't take it seriously, what difference does it make? >> you have really cut to the heart. you know how to hurt a girl. [laughter] you cut to the heart of the matter. one of the reasons that i wrote this book was to try to put the information in front of people. that is all as a journalist you can really do. to tell it -- there are a lot of stories there. i went to the great barrier reef, the amazon, the andes to try to bring people stories of what is going on in the world and bring this issue alive.

that, many people have tried to bring this to the public attention and the politics seem to be stuck. we are still at loggerheads over this. the only thing i can do as a journalist is put it out there. tavis: let me make you feel a little better now. by hitting you in your sweet spot. you'd revel the world. what is the true line for what you saw? sum of theo really most remote places that a person can get to. everywhere that i was going, i was going with scientists. everywhere that we were going, people were looking at human impact. greate cases, on the barrier reef it was with scientists who were studying the

impact of our carbon emissions on the ocean. what is sometimes called global warming's equally evil twin is that a lot of our carbon admissions are ending up in the oceans and changing ocean chemistry. the great barrier reef has lost something like 50% of its coral cover in the last 30 years. use of title the book, and unnatural history. starts the debate of whether this is natural. tell me why you chose that as a subtitle. >> it is a bit of a play on words. one of the key questions of the is, wheref our time do humans fit into the natural order? for a long time, science has gone in the direction of putting people in their place. we learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. we learned that we are just another species evolved like all

other species. we are just another animal. part of the point of my book is to get people to push things back the other way and say, yes, we are just another species but we are a very unusual species. not just in our time but when you look over the expanse of geological history, we turned out to be an unusual force. tavis: it doesn't necessarily make us special. is there a point in there? >> it is a very interesting point. as it turns out, we have largely changedintending it, the world. when you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world. it just happens to have that impact. we have done a lot of things without even realizing it. just being unusual does not put

you above any of the other organisms with whom we share this fine it. tavis: how much of what you saw convinced you that the damage that has already been done is irreparable? as the saying goes, extension is forever. even in the course of four or -- forars, i saw animals example, these remarkable frogs from the tropics. i saw some of them and they are not here anymore. they are extinct. there is no going back. we minimize our impact? absolutely. there are a lot of things we can do to minimize what we are doing but we are not getting back those frogs that i saw that no longer exist. tavis: give me some sense of the

scale that it would take vis-à-vis our commitment, our engagement, to turn the clock back on what you lay out in the text? >> to take climate change as a central example -- i talk about a couple different phenomena in the book. sometimes say we need to be almost on a wartime footing. whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels which is taking co2 out of the ground and putting it in the air. if you want to change that, you have to really concentrate on it. everything has to go in the right direction. one of the reasons that many people are critical of president obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand, he says the right things. he says he is committed to reducing carbon permissions.

beene other hand, he has promoting a lot of oil drilling, gas drilling. everything has to be pointing in the same direction. you have to really turn this whole economic engine from one that is based on fossil fuels to one that isn't. that is a massive undertaking. not now,o be starting last year basically. tavis: barack obama to your point might be saying more than environmentalists want to hear compared to a guy like george w. bush. whether the president is a republican or democrat, calvin coolidge once said the business of america is business. republican or democrat, we get this -- not a lot happens. how much of this sixth extinction will have to be blamed on the business of america?

>> that is a really good question. one of the points i make in the book is we have been at this world-altering project for quite a long time. when humanss arrived in the hawaiian islands. a lot of the native fauna was destroyed by rats they brought along. it is not something that we just said, now we are going to really start changing the planet. but it has really ramped up with industrialization. we in this country are at the forefront of that. it is certainly at this point a project that most people in the globe are part of. it is going to take massive global scale change. that is another problem we face. a lot of blame game going on. what are the chinese doing, what are we doing?

we need both the developed word and the developing world to be moving once again in the same direction. tavis: the industrialized nations are doing the lion's share of the damage. --se developing nations every time there is a conference, they are pointing their finger and saying, usa, china, you all are making the rest of us suffer. say a bit about the damage we thecausing not just to embarrassment, but how so much of this is on us as compared to these developing nations. >> if you look at -- there are co2ts that look at how much the average american puts into the atmosphere. and how much the average ethiopian is putting into the air. you look at, what other the consequences of climate change?

they are going to be potentially most severe for those people have contributed the least. the issue of global justice here is very intense. it hangs over all these global climate talks. it is one of the reasons we don't seem to make any progress. developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change which we would all want to give. meanwhile increasing numbers of people are feeling it very strongly. tavis: it is fascinating. whether we want to hear this or not, we may end up killing off the rest of the world because of the way we now treat the environment. two other things, two other ways that we are causing the world to move closer to extinction. >> we are moving a lot of things around the planet. there are estimates that in

-- 10,000 species are moving around the planet every day. that has the effect of bringing the continents together. all of these creatures that evolved separately, we can bring them together overnight. in the case of frogs in the tropics, many of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people. that is one way we are changing the planet. another way that people are familiar with is, we are just mowing down forests. if you are an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore. that is another way. best bookmay be the written about these matters in quite some time. it is called "the sixth extinction." whoten by elizabeth kolbert covers these matters for the new yorker magazine. good to have you on the program.

coming up, a conversation with comedian greg edwards. we are back in a moment. stay with us. tavis: here is a description to challenge you. this character is called a padded up harpooner. this description and many more are performed by greg edwards. an internet sensation for his videos called "thug notes" in which he portrays a professional doctor, sparky sweets who redefines the work of every literary giant. let's take a look at a clip from "thug notes." ♪ , this is sparky sweets. we are going buck wild. listen up, playboy. this book is an albacore it

effort -- allegorical effort. watching the little white boys lose their minds, we are reminded of humanity's capacity for evil. waclkestto know the irony of all? that soldier be smack in the middle of a war. that full was trying to get the drop on his enemy when he found these kids. the real tragedy is that ain't nobody to save civilized humanity from their violent nature neither. tavis: i feel you. [laughter] can i just tell you i love you? >> thank you. tavis: i love what you are doing. i thought the pbs audience might love getting exposed to somebody who is taking this wonderful literature and making it understandable. making it usable.

it don't mean nothing if your intellect is usable. if you have a brilliant intellect and it is not usable, what difference does it make? how did this get started? >> it started from this production company called napkin note. it is two guys, jared and jacob. jared thought of this idea of interpreting classical literature into a dialect that is more comfortable for students to understand. most americans, really. i don't feel like this is a street vernacular. i hear black people speak like this, asian people, everybody talks like this. we just wanted to break it down and use it for the classrooms. kind of response have you been getting? >> it is huge. new york times -- tavis: i am speechless. >> huffington post.

interviews doing with people from poland, switzerland. it is great. tavis: give me some sense about how you go about choosing the material. how do you figure out what has a storyline to it that can be translatable in your style? >> we have a list of school literature for high school students and college students. we go through book by book. we try to incorporate with holidays like valentine's day. we will do a book that talks about love. romeo and juliet. sometimes, with movies that are coming out. tavis: how often are you shooting new episodes? >> we should once a month. we should five episodes in one day. tavis: what has been the viralay of the wild success of this for you? what do you make of this? >> i am a standup.

i have been doing comedy for 12 years. comedy, doing standup, it is a rough road. it is a long dedication and sacrifice. this has helped me get out more, put my face on the internet. it has given me more bookings. tavis: what do you make of the opportunity you now have to do comedy that is smart comedy? i don't think that smart comedy has to be preachy. nobody wants to hear that. we want to be entertained. but if you can make us laugh and make us think, that is the double bonus. >> i think so. there are plenty of smart comedians out there. sometimes black comedy gets a reputation of being, saying these words or having this point of view, but there are plenty of comedians out there. patrice o'neal, god rest his soul, he was an awesome dude that could relate to the people and do something else very intellectual. dave chappelle, chris rock.

there is new guys out there like hannibal birds from chicago. there are plenty of comics. to pushr responsibility the envelope and make people think. like you said, not be too preachy about it. just go about it the right way. open up the doors to more people like us. tavis: you live this every day. given how difficult it can be to make a living as a comedian, why did you choose to do this? veryis came to me in a weird way. totallyucer worked on biased with a mentor of mine. great comedian, awesome guy, family man. he put me into the right relationships, the right clubs. when he thought of this idea, he was shooting the pilot and he asked the head writer who would be a good person for this in los angeles.

he said made. i auditioned. it just worked out. i came in at the right time. it has been a blessing. range toat is the age your mind for the audience for this kind of work? >> i am crazy with it. we should once a month and a new video comes out every tuesday morning. i am on youtube looking at all the comments. it ranges. we get kids from sixth grade all the way up to older people commenting on the videos. everybody. the topics that we talk about our literature that people have read in high school. even if it is an older person, they see the visuals, they hear my voice and it brings back ideas. i think it makes people want to pick up the book and read it again. tavis: give me an example of a piece of literature that you have already shot the piece for

that people were most surprised by what they learned when they saw you do what you do. we read all these books. i am trying to get a sense of what people responded to when they heard your delivery on it. of the flies, that was a good one. we talked about racism, we talked about how everything -- there is one part of the book where the kids, after they finished beating each other up, he sees a guy in the military and thinks the guy is there to save him. he is really only there just to spy on a war. thatnalysis is so in-depth we give people an opportunity to look at it through our eyes. it makes them go back and read the book. and it makes them look at this

like, this is how i think about the book. it is all right. it is interpreted for anybody to have their point of view. kids, you can listen to your teacher, listen to your mom, but have your own point of view. tavis: how much of your comedy styling do you put into the material at the writer's table? >> they write the script out but we have a really diverse crew. we have a guy in texas who is a phd. he sends it over to jared, our producer. he sends it over to me. i take on the slang words and put emphasis here. if there is a certain word i don't think is appropriate, we will change it up. on the set.v we have a lot of fun. tavis: how much of this is improv? >> most of it is scripted. there is certain things.

a lot of it is improv. it goes back and forth. we take something, how do you like that? i feel a little indifferent about it. then they added it all together. tavis: what do you want to do with all this? what is the endgame for you? >> i grew up on pbs with reading rainbow, levar burton. [laughter] tavis: but he couldn't do this. you ain't going to see this on reading rainbow. >> i wanted to do like a newer version. we are not trying to stop kids from reading the book. doors, want to open up maybe teachers can use it. it is hard being a teacher nowadays. you are underpaid, overworked. kids are crazy. throw this on and maybe it might

spark one kid's attention. tavis: the new york times did a wonderful piece. this is the kind of stuff we need to see more of. greg and youknow know that his work is called "thug notes" you can check it out. you will be entertained and empowered by it. if there are any kids in your life who you want to take a different look at the stuff you have been trying to get them to read, have them check out "thug notes." congratulations. good to have you on the program. it is our show for tonight. angst for watching and as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: join me next time for a conversation with peniel joseph a life and mission. that is next time. we will see you later.

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