chris chris hayes, tim hernandez, annie jacobsen, david horowitz and many more. for a complete schedule go to go to our website@booktv.org. you can also follow us on facebook, facebook .com/book tv, on twitter @booktv and on instagram at book -underscore tv for lots of behind-the-scenes images and videos. this is book tv's live live coverage of the los angeles times possible of books and will begin with the author panel on the environment. >> i'm alex. i do the morning edition on 89.3 mac. [applause] i am thrilled to have the three wonderful guests who are with us this morning to discuss a very important topic, environment, surviving the future. i'll tell you a little bit about each one of them starting to my far left, lee van der voo is an independent journalist and one of my cities in the planet, portland oregon. the author of the fish market inside the big-money battle for the ocean in your dinner plate. sitting next to her let's hold our pasta the very end, sitting in the middle is miriam horn the author of several books putting the new york times best-selling earth, the sql. she works at lives in new york city and her latest title is rancher, farmer, conservation heroes of the american heartland. last but not least my ebd left is steve early, community-based activists based in california. he's a past contributor to publications like the la times, boston globe, usa today, the nation, the progressive and many more. he also helped. he also helped initiate labor for bernie and belongs to the richmond which is america's most successful municipal reforms organizations. his latest book is refinery town, big oil,big money and remaking american city. now, a big round of applause. [applause] i wanted to start off our discussion by talking about when it comes to the environment why books ? especially in this day and age where so much of our news and information via broadcast, tv spots, radio spots, twitter, facebook. these things take a long time to read and certainly, a long time to write. i'd love to hear from each of you and steve, let's start with you. why are books about the environment important in this day and age? >> i'm blown away by the scale of this event. i want to applaud everyone for choosing this particular item on the smorgasbord of the book festival. and for coming out. i've done three previous books, never been to a book festival and the idea that more than a hundred thousand people would come to a weekend of book chat and book buying and grappling with the issues that officers of various types raise in the books vindicates my own personal decision, with the help of publishing a fourth book. i salute you who are all here. i think certain topics the complex issues involving race and class and environmental justice, community safety, economics, injustice injustice that i try to deal with in refinery town are not easily addressed in a tweet. i'm sticking with the book format [for the time being. >> miriam, we still have imagine you. your book is a movie. there can be additional ways and other mediums for addressing environmental issues. what is the importance of environmental books in 2017? >> i love this person. it gets at what i set out to do with this book which was to try to move beyond the simplistic and ideological ways they get engaged. my book is about red state conservationist and i wrote it with the intention really of reaching two diametrically opposed audiences. i wanted to reach audiences on the left to dispel the myth that the only good approach to food production is small in local and organic. and retrieve some of these people who get regularly demonized. i wanted to speak to the right and remind them how deeply conservation values run in this country and how deeply conservative those values are. i wanted to suppress an honor to these characters to win their trust and keep the conversation going. the only way to do that, i settled on telling five stories, very deeply. trying to do it through heated language and anecdote, it just reinforces the divides and the way to bridge the divide is to reveal the scientific complexities, all the trade-offs, like a kansas farmer is actually saving up to and balance so getting deep enough into the science but getting deep enough into these families and their values to help people understand the depth of their commitment. >> will get back to. having read miriam's book, you get the sense that i feel like i could drop by one of these people's homes and introduce myself. i could stay your house because i know them so well. lee, what about you? what's the value of an entire book? you were not planning on writing a book necessarily. >> no, i was not. i let my i'll echo what my fellow panelist said. there's enough space to do these topics does this. i came very much an article writer and then an investigative journalist for 18 years and i had somewhat followed the discussion about our nation's approach to sustainable seafood and policymaking and when it came time to write it i thought i didn't have the space or marketplace. after meeting with the topic both on contracts for magazines and is a fellow for a couple of years i felt that the story was much deeper than what we were seen in general media and i wanted to be able to tell it. >> everyone up here today has a very personal connection to their story. i'd like to kind of help reveal that to everyone here today. miriam, we'll will stick with you and have you read a passage. lee basically lost a bet and that's how she wrote a book. which is sometimes how the best books come to be. could you share a passage? >> i did indeed lose a bet in a bar and that was how i wrote the first set of articles in the theory that led to this book. i had done a piece about salmon and salmon fishing in oregon where i live and i was in a bar loudly complaining about how it's never going to do it again that i didn't think people were interested in seafood topics, that it turned out always be a dustup between who gets what, mostly fishermen and someone there, a friend of mine, that he could get me to do it and started telling me about catchers. i was doing a lot of food and sustainability writing at the time so the idea of policy eating wasn't new to a journalist. greenwashing was a consumer plague of the millennium and organic foods do to the main hippie food. organics were $25 billion industry in industry in the united states, one in which fair trade and eventually conscious brand were garnering a premium. consumers who didn't want their eggs laid by caged chickens or their beef. [inaudible] i was already covering an enormous. [inaudible] i was given that the seafood counter was the place inside the grocery store where people looked the most lost seemed like a reasonable venue for hood winking. [laughter] >> steve, you are one of the few lucky to buy a house in california these days. most people as you know, it's no small feat in southern california, certainly no small feat in southern northern california. not long after that a little happen and that prompted your book. can you tell us what happened? >> i can show some of the people what happened. you have to be careful about who your industrial neighbors are when you move into certain communities in california including richmond california. has anyone been to richmond? my god. this is the richmond dais for a period of former richmond resident to my right who lived in the city during her graduate school years at uc berkeley and miriam is a graduate of kennedy high school, if you can believe that. a hard-core richmond night. anyway, richman richmond civic life has been dominated for centuries by big oil. this is what the city's shoreline look like on a big oil bad hair day like the one in august of 2012 when due to the companies long-standing practice of putting profits and productions ahead of worker safety, environmental health, community safety, there was a major pipe fire, huge tiring of toxic smoke covering cities in the east bay, 15,000 refinery neighbors were sent scrabbling for medical assistance. every emergency room, clinic in the area, the company copped a plea to various civil and criminal penalties and was assessed the longest ocean fine in the history of the state. they haven't paid. the city is suing them over this, damaging impact on property values including the property of recent people who had recently moved in. it got me thinking about the history of big oil, his relationship to the community for the labor, history struggles in the last ten or 15 years people have risen up to challenge big oil's control over city hall. >> just because it's compelling detail, can can you show where your wife was when this happened. this is personal. >> you can't quite see our garden in the picture but she was in the garden and i'm not sure if everybody is familiar, maybe the richmond people are, public safety protocol shelter in place. she grew up in the 1950s living under the shadow of a nuclear attack and you did a few drilled in elementary school. you crouched under your desperate in place is what you're supposed to do on the same scale of effectiveness when you have a fossil fuel catastrophe or accident like this. the siren sounds and you go into your house and you tape your doors and windows, my wife was in the garden and she didn't know this protocol and she was told by a neighbor, get in the house. that lasted about five minutes and we jumped in the car and raced off to berkeley. >> likewise, miriam, you have a very personal connection. i feel like it's a little less dated by. [inaudible] i'll figure out what's going on. when i first read about your book, the thought that went through my mind was what a nice girl living in new york city doing all the spending time along the mississippi river which is the thread that connects all of your stories. the passage of selected illustrates the importance of the core of it. would you read it? >> there is a personal connection. was rather tell me the personal perspective. tell both. >> start with the passage because it talks about the importance of this area. >> as i said, it'sa journey to the mississippi water, the third largest river in the world, drained almost half of the united states, it's been absolutely critical to american both history and natural history california has lot of of natural resources but mississippi watershed holds the vast majority of our mineral wealth and food wealth. i was interested in it for all of those reasons but also because it mapped perfectly to red state america and because i had come to know that the people who worked these landscapes were playing a critical role in their destinies. america depends on these grand lake working landscapes and in turn they depend on a number of people. the families who live by harvesting their bounty. farmers and ranchers make up 1% of the us population but manage two thirds of the nation's land. agriculture has greater impact on water, land and terrestrial diversity than any other human enterprise. that's true everywhere making this region a bottle for the world. half of earth's ice free land is in pastor or farm. crops now cover an area the size of south america and livestock, graze and expand as big as africa. together they use 70% of all freshwater. fishermen have an equally enormous impact harvesting 90 million metric tons of fish annually. equivalent is to pulling the human weight of china out of the sea every year. as these productive landscapes grow increasingly precarious, over graves, over hills come over fish, threatened by invasive species development, ill-conceived piece of engineering and extreme weather it is the families that run the tractors and barges and fishing votes who are stepping up to save them. theirs is the most consequential efforts to restore america's grasslands, wildlife, soils, rivers, wetlands industries. the vast rich bounty that shapes our national character and sustains our way of life. >> interpersonal connection. >> it's having grown up in el cerrito, in california i spent as much of my childhood in a farm in winters which is west of davis. with a farsighted farming family. they were farming a very large scale come about 5000 acres but were already this is in the 60s and 70s and were already looking forward to anticipating the struggles that california was going to face in terms of more extreme weather and water challenges and they were acutely aware of the impact the downstream impact that everything they did had and so they were my first real teachers on these complex trade-offs and really thinking across space and time in wayne though sprayed us. i then in my 20s ducked out of college for seven years and worked for the us forrester's in colorado and there i had a really similar experience in this case with ranchers and loggers and even some minors. again, coming to experience the depth of knowledge and love and commitment that people who live and work on these lands it really bring to the task. >> does anyone here remember the old sesame street where they say this so was brought to you by the letter and we would say this panel is brought to you letter by the p. we have a particular lens to this panel. for steve it was a place, richmond and the focus of his book. for miriam it was people, her story was told the individuals that she met along the way and lee, your p's practice. it was really important, i'd love to see a quick raise of hands of people who have eaten a fish of some variety, any variety in the past 15 months? great. second follow-up question and it's okay if the answer is no. how many of you feel like you have a very strong understanding of where that fish came from and how it was caught and who was catching it? okay. with that in mind, you'll you'll want to hear what lee has to say. lee, can you explain but in lehman turns what is this policy and practice you write about? >> sure. absolutely. the united states sets limits on how many of us could come of the water in every given year. the fish we catch any today we want them to be here tomorrow, ten years from now, 15 years now. now. how that cap is an force can vary. a catcher is one of those tools and how it works is essentially, taking the pie of all the fish that can be caught in a given year and slicing it up and giving it ownership to various pieces to qualifying fishermen, corporations and the particular structure in that region for that particular fish. the bet is that if you give the people a stake in ownership they will take care of it, they'll have an interest in conservation because the long-term gain will off on and also be theirs. it's a little bit of a gamble. it's like giving 100 people houses and betting that everyone will cut their grass. you don't really know. ownership means different things to different people and so the effect of this has been a little mixed. lots of people who are owners became good stewards and they are the folks that are bringing us some of the incredible pieces of products that we have today and they're innovating the seafood supply chains so that more people when that chris comes around where it is her first come be able to raise her hands. but many folks did opt to become landlords in the system. they rent the rights to go fishing from their share. they don't miss anymore and that makes it tough for the young fishermen to climb in the system. it's like trying to buy that house from the landlord that can raise the rent on you. it's difficult. as investors and corporations and equity groups become the next owners of these shares to go fishing, that is upsetting the small business tradition that has unmarred fishing and coastal, sorry, been the foundational of pitching in coastal communities for many years. >> lee, your book is about a practice but it's also about very much about people and you get a sense of what these fishermen are up against. there so many? i hate to sound trite today but. [inaudible] could you maybe tell us about one of the many that you mention who began to make you question is this really thebest policy that we can come up with? >> o
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