>> we do have a culture of avoidance and denial and we want to engage in the pleasures of today and tomorrow's another story. >> denial is a word that actually refers to quite a few different processes, and our denial of the environmental damage that we're doing probably includes all of these different processes in one way or another. i know many times when i was initially reading about extinction, i would hear these overwhelming statistics, you know, 3 to 10 species going extinct every day. i would feel my stomach turning or i would feel depressed and i would read

on and probably within an hour or so, have completely forgotten about it. i didn't know how to wrap my mind around these overwhelming statistics. >> what we're talking about here with extinction is a kind of unraveling of the fabric of life. just the shock of that, you know, the sense of--there is something going on here that's so potentially threatening to my sense of well-being that i have to shut it out in some way. >> i don't really think we're running around in denial in the sense of not knowing what's going on, or not caring about what's going on, but we are running around

in terms of dissociating from what we know and what we feel. >> now wait a minute, doctor! i think that-- >> steve, you wait a minute. what you think has no bearing whatever on your condition. >> most people really do care about the environment. they care about what's happening to the earth, it makes them sad, unhappy, angry, and yet we go about our lives as if this wasn't happening. so our actions are split off from what we know, and what we feel. >> it's beyond anything that humans have had to face ever before, and so the magnitude of what we are trying to do in terms of getting past this denial, is quite large. when you think about it, what does our culture offer us

in the way of wisdom to deal with any kind of difficulty? our cultural wisdom is, "buy this, it'll make you happy." >> our society helps our denial, helps our dissociation. it encourages it, and even structures it into the way that the whole society operates. the media is continually telling us that in order to be happy, we need to consume. it's almost un-american not to want to participate in this mad rush to own more and more things. we know that we're consuming, and it's destroying the environment, so we split off what we know about the environment when we're in the store. >> in order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. and it's not necessary that the lies be particularly believable,

but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. if space aliens were doing what this culture is doing, if aliens came down from outer space and they were vacuuming the oceans--90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone--90%. if they were changing our genetic structure with phthalates, and they were changing the climate, we would fight back. >> when you have loudspeakers out there, the megaphone from the polluting corporate interests that are out there being able to say, "don't worry, there is no problem, there are some alarmists out there that might be trying to mislead you, but there really is no problem." who are you going to want to believe? the person that's telling you, "no problem, don't worry about it." or the person that says, "this is the worst problem the planet has ever faced, you might actually have to engage in some introspection upon how you live your life." >> we have the illusion,

or delusion, that we are not dependent on nature. we live in a world that's mostly human-built. we live in buildings that are sealed shut in urban and suburban settings, the natural gets pushed further and further away, and so we live, in a sense, encased in human fantasy of what life is. >> a lot of people say that cities are places of sensory overload. its actually the opposite. it's a place of sensory deprivation because every sound, every smell, every sight is either originating in or mediated by human beings, and so you are basically living in an echo chamber. you don't get these reality checks of non-humans to tell you that there are others and to make you sane. we live day to day surrounded. i mean, right now, how many

machines are within ten yards of us? how many machines do you have a daily relationship with? how many wild animals do you have a daily relationship with? its no wonder we don't defend the place we live, we don't live there. that's insane. if insanity means being out of touch with physical reality, we don't even need to use a pejorative definition of insanity. >> aah! >> no way. >> we have whole generations at this point that lack access and understanding and relationship to the living world. this new study, "nature deficit disorder," is a really fascinating conundrum for people. why care about something if i have no relationship to it and if i can't put a name on it, i don't have a connection. >> where does your food come from? if your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. not philosophy, not what

you believe in your heart, but your experience. if, on the other hand, your experience is that your food comes from a landbase and that your water comes from a river, then you will defend to the death that landbase and that river because your life depends on it. >> the industrial growth society makes it very easy for us to stay in denial, because it conveys to us a self-image of being a very small and a very needy kind of being. we are actually prey to a late capitalist economic system that has been for generations consistently breeding a kind of self-loathing, a kind of self-deprecation. >> like any good abusive system, this system has made us dependant upon it for our very lives, which means we can only

fight it half-heartedly. that's one of the things that happens all the time with abusive family dynamics. let's say that a man is abusive to his wife. one of the things he will do is make her dependant--economically, socially, self-esteem wise-- upon him. because otherwise she is not going to put up with it. it's the same--we have been made dependant upon this very system that's exploiting us. and that makes it much, much, much more difficult to fight. >> there is an enormous gap between what the academic community knows needs to be done if we are going to have a decent world for our grandchildren, and what the public understands, and more than that, what the politicians are willing to do. the average politician always wants more consumption, thinks that's the way to keep the economy growing, and it's sort of like trying to find some way to keep your cancer growing. >> we know that the best scientists in the world have been telling us for a long time

that this is in fact the worst crisis this planet has ever faced, and so there truly is a disconnect between that fact, and the fact that environmental organizations, who the public look to for information, aren't hearing that message. this can lead people to wonder. if they're not hearing from the sierra club, which is one of the organizations in this country that people look to for good information about what is really going on, then it must not really be an issue. the sierra club, and other environmental groups, tends to not invest resources in educating the public about the extinction crisis because it isn't perceived to get much political bang for the buck. >> more and more as the years go by, the important questions in biology are bad news, and it's very hard to bring bad news because people don't like the bad news. so there is a very strong drive for scientists not to even work on this topic,

unless they're somehow protected within the scientific community. we say there is one question, one career. you dare ask one question and find the answer, and make it public, and your career is shot. so it doesn't take too many of these examples for scientists to learn, to recognize that there is a risk in being outspoken about the problems. >> there's a risk with your academic colleagues to speaking out. when i originally got involved in this, i sort of naively thought that science was the total answer. i thought that if i presented good science to industry, that they would do the right thing, that they would alter their practices so that they would reduce harm to the environment and to people. >> even though we can remove pollution downstream, clean up a watershed; we can create

new laws for greater equity in education or healthcare, but ultimately those are just helping the symptoms. until we address our way of thinking, and our whole framework and orientation, we're going to continue to make mistakes. >> now look, steve, i'm your doctor, remember? your friend! you're only cutting your own throat when you act this way. you've got to face up to reality.

>> it is really very difficult in my experience to persuade people that something that may happen in fifty years time, or the full result of which will be known in fifty years time, is something they should worry about today. this is extraordinarily shortsighted and extraordinarily foolish, and is a complete contradiction to the idea that

it was human intelligence that made us successful. we do not use the very evolutionary attribute that brought us to where we are. >> all of the problems we see in our outer environment, whether it's racism, classism, poverty, starvation, now environmental destruction, pollution, all of the crises that we're seeing economically, globally, socially, could be traced back to a flaw, if you will, in human thought and the human thought process and consciousness. >> if you think about our evolutionary history, all the time that we've been evolving, except for the last century or so, there was no point at all in being able to perceive long term trends because there was nothing at all we could do about them. so when it came to selection designing our perceptual systems, how we perceive the world, the important thing was to see what's happening

fast. you still have that. for instance, if a car swerves at you, you instantaneously know what to do, but when you tell someone that the climate is gradually changing, you don't see it because you perceive the world, the backdrop of the world, as unchanging. it's like having an ecological stage on which there are actors, and you put all your attention into the actors, and evolution has never taught you to pay attention to what's happening to the stage, 'cause there never was a reason. >> so in a sense, we can think of our almost seeming lack of capacity to consider these issues as nature's flaw that has been built into us, and that we can only overcome through education, and through using our reasoning power to overcome our natural tendency to just look at the sun came up today, it'll come up tomorrow, it seems like everything's fine.

>> i think it will continue to erode very quickly-- we are in a very steep down slope right now. i don't think there's any doubt in my mind that our life is changing already. >> this mass extinction is different from all our other environmental problems. we can clean up pollution, even the worst pollution. we can replant the forests, we can drive back the deserts, all those problems are reversible. might take a little while, might cost a few billion dollars, but we can do it, we know that. but when a species is gone, it's gone for good. >> these are not issues that are three or 400 years from now, they're almost certainly 40 to 50 years from now. we need to start doing something now.

>> ok, you're the doctor, i guess i can gag down pills and live on a diet if i have to. >> i wish that were all there was to it. >> my concern is that we will be in a kind of crisis mode, taking care of whatever catastrophes are facing us, and that will get in the way of long-term thinking, because we're going to be so concerned with the flood or the loss of crops, or whatever it is, and we'll go back to our knee-jerk reactions of trying to create an even more powerful technology to control nature. >> the most optimistic scenario is that by mid-century, there will be 9 billion of us, and all of those people will want to live as well as we do in the west.

>> if we don't get out of individuals competing with each other in the society for who can consume the most, for societies that don't have a lot now following the path of consuming as much as many western societies are now, then it won't really matter that we've stabilized the population. consumption alone will kill us. >> we're already above the long-term carrying capacity, using anything like the lifestyles and technologies we have today. and what you're seeing is a continual deterioration of the life and prospects of many people on the planet. now if you ask the question, how many human beings might die because of the loss of biodiversity, we could easily be talking about billions, because we depend on biodiversity for a wide range of ecosystem services, which if they falter,

we're going to be in deep trouble. when we wipe out populations and species of other organisms, we're sawing off the limb that we're sitting on. >> life is not going to disappear, for all the things that we might foist upon it. the question is whether we will be there in that world, and whether we will be there in a way that not only we are surviving, but that we desire. i often think of it as though we are on a train. a train that we know is going to go into a tunnel. it's not a question about running to the back of the train to just enjoy the little bit of light before the train goes into a tunnel. we are in the tunnel. we are entering that tunnel and the question is where do you choose to locate yourself? who do you choose to be with? what do you choose to be doing? in such a way that after we come out the other end of this crisis, this tunnel, the world will be a world that you desire and you want

to be in. because we are going through that tunnel-- because there are very difficult times coming ahead. >> there's so much grief connected with not just extinction but the loss of our connection with the earth, with the land, with all the plants and animals, and other beings that live here. >> there's grief in us. whether we give voice to it or not, it's there, because we are seeing what is happening to this earth, in terms of toxic poisoning, contamination, climate change, and spasms of extinction; the dimensions of hunger, of violence, the addiction to war and war-making;

so there's an ache inside everybody, i know that. and we don't have the tools, by and large, to deal with that, because this ache, this anguish, is beyond the personal woes that the human animal has encountered from the beginning. to allow yourself to touch your sorrow is a politically subversive act. this is not just feeling pity for the beautiful animals that are facing extinction. it's a recognition, it's a shudder of mortality ourselves. >> this isn't a matter of an individual species going extinct here and there, and i don't believe that our grief is for individual species. we can sense on some

level that a great dying is happening. we simply feel that longing for something that we've evolved to experience-- that intimacy and connection with all that lives. >> the culture that we inhabit privatizes that grief, it reduces it to some personal maladjustment, to some personal pathology, as if your ache for other beings and species is some kind of neurosis. that pain for our world, it doesn't spring from craziness, it springs from our interconnectedness. it springs from profound caring, and that springs from our mutual belonging. there's no birth of consciousness without pain.

and it hurts for us to see what's happening to our planet, but it's through that pain also that we are discovering that we belong to each other. and we know that we are part of an unbroken chain of the adventure of life. and this little lifetime we have, we learn to see it in a wider time frame, from which flow in so much inspiration. guts. nerve. poetry. song. beauty. >> preventing extinction is going to be a big challenge

for human society, but it's certainly one that we're capable of doing. >> what we have to do is to learn to live with the planet that we have and we'll have to learn to tread lightly upon the ground. can we do that? yes. but to do that we have to stop taking nature for granted, and the services that she provides. >> it's people--more than any other force, more than any physical or other force in the universe, that will dictate the future course of life. >> as the ones that set the conditions for life of so many other species, we've become responsible for them. >> i love the word responsibility because if you take it back to its roots what it really means is to give in return. so the question i have is, to whom do you owe your loyalty? to whom will you give in return? are you going

to give in return to weyerhaeuser? are you going to give in return to monsanto? are you going to give in return to the land that ultimately supplies you with life?

>> when the time is ripe, societies can change with incredible rapidity. i think our big problem now is to find ways to ripen the time. >> where change will happen or has to happen and we have that capacity to change is at the local level. i think what we're going to see is the fostering of the local cultures, depending on where they are, depending on what social

resources they have, human resources they have, and certainly depending on what ecological resources are left for them to use. >> what do you want to have replace this culture? i don't want one culture to replace this one. i want 10,000 different cultures to replace this one, each one springing up from its own landbase. what would that mean to incorporate, to bring in the land where you live into your day-to-day decisions? what would it be like to actually live where you live? >> i think anybody who would answer the question, "what alternative do we need?" with one answer is wrong. because i think the answers will have to be from very different disciplines in very different places, some of them implying some technological development--yes, there's nothing wrong with technology, but i think having the scientist and the technologist drive the one answer for the whole world is the problem.

>> in indigenous cultures, your identity is based on a matrix of relationships with your human community and your more-than-human community, your sacred landscape that you emerge from. and in our modern society, it really is based on what you acquire. we acquire knowledge in a consumer way, and we acquire things in a consumer way. and that's a very sad state of affairs, actually, compared to the type of holistic identity that we can have--all humans can have, and all traditional societies have had this, it's a very recent phenomenon that we've become so individualistic and so materialistic. i feel that there's an invisible thread of compassion between people, who are finding each other, who are creating alliances, who are creating

organizations, who are creating a movement, a movement of survival, a movement of recovery. and it's happening all over the world. >> if i think of what we're doing, and imagine where the answer is going to come from, i'm pretty sure that it's not going to come from doing more of what we're doing. the answers will come from doing something actually really different. >> what i want you to do is to work on your attitude. >> my attitude?! >> that's right. >> every choice we make has an environmental implication. you can't do one thing without it causing a ripple effect. that can be overwhelming and daunting but it can also be empowering. that means that in our daily lives we can have positive effects on global biodiversity. >> how we redefine the good

life, how we say having less can actually invite being more, all of these kinds of transformations are very spiritual transformations, religious transformations, moral transformations. i think the characteristic that we need to bring to sustainability is reverence for life, which has been missing in a lot of the environmental discussions, which are so driven by science and policy. and that piece of reverence, of respect for life and its interwoven relatedness, is what the religious communities are now bringing, all of them, from the indigenous traditions down to modern religions as well. >> if you're a christian, or a person of any faith sitting in a pew professing a love for god, then you have a responsibility to care for god's creation.

it's bringing religions together. we are the stewards of creation, and we can come together around that idea. >> i am continually astonished by what is happening in the time that i am alive, and that we're alive here on this earth. something is birthing now, an awareness is coming to us that is totally fresh, and we're discovering that we're living parts of a living earth. our sense of self becomes inseparable from the living planet. that's a shift of mind. it's an awakening of consciousness. >> it's an ancient sensibility, but it is also a new sensibility. this shift means that human love is now being

extended into the whole community of life, and that will fundamentally shape who we will be as humans. >> by making this shift, we undo the split that has happened, the disassociation with our love and our care and our passion, and our appreciation of the natural world. >> some guy wrote to me several years ago and said "i don't know what to do because my son is 17 and he's really active and he's really working hard on all this stuff, and i don't know how to give him hope, because i don't have any myself and i don't want to lie to him." and i wrote back and said, "don't give your son hope, give him love. if he loves, he'll fight back."

>> there is a lot of hope in my mind. what i want to work on is to try and develop the social relationships that will help us make the landing that we are heading towards not a crash, but something that we might desire, that we might like. it's a fight to save ourselves, and the things that we love. >> within a generation's time, we are going to have made an enormous number of decisions

that will effect countless generations to come. this is something that we have to do now. it's not something that we can postpone to our children or our grandchildren--it's up to us. this is a responsibility that our generation has uniquely. >> we have to begin the process of reinventing what it means to be human. >> all these eons of evolution have brought us here at this time of such challenge. such danger. we don't know whether it'll be a dying or an awakening. but we do know that that uncertainty itself brings forth our greatest intelligence and courage. >> i count myself fortunate to be a member of a generation at a time when we have it in our power, in our hands, to save species--not just a gorilla here and a panda there and a blue whale somewhere

else we have it in our power to save species in their many millions, if we really want to. >> shouldn't we really consider ourselves to be a privileged generation that has such mighty issues to grapple with. unique in all of human history, we have before us an issue of supreme importance. what could be more purposeful, more meaningful--to choose to fight for things that are so good and noble, like preserving a planet for there to be life on, and preserving that life so that there can be a future. >> it's not too late. we have all that it takes to care for the world we inherited. we have only to make up our minds to do it, and answer the call. k7ccq??gg99g

what are we doing today? today we are looking for roger ridley. he's a street musician that plays down here in santa monica. i was walking by the promenade the other day and i heard him singing the song "stand by me". such an amazing version, such an amazing voice, you know. and a couple days before that i had heard the john lennon version. so i approached roger and i said, "hey man, if we come back down here with some recording equipment and some cameras, we'd love to record you and film you playing "stand by me". why roger? well the thing about music is that sometimes the best music in the world is just in the moment. its not always famous musicians or things you hear on the radio or