 Professor Madsen is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, an academic leader, and an organizational strategist. She has been at Stanford for many, many years. She served as the dean of the School of Earth from 2002 to 2017. And we are so grateful that she could join us this morning, Pam. So happy to have you. We are excited to hear from you. The floor is yours. Okay, thank you so much. I'm really happy to join you all this morning. Just a bit about myself, you know, I was trained as a biogeochemist, and I spent the first, maybe half of my research career studying the drivers of greenhouse gas emissions that were, of course, driving climate change. And it was very exciting and interesting. But somewhere along the line, I realized that I'd really like to not just understand what was happening, but try to help solve some problems, help do something about it. And I switched my research to trying to limit, along with interdisciplinary teams of researchers, but also stakeholders to, I focused on trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and to reduce vulnerability of agriculture to climate change. And that shift from a biogeochemist was really to a sustainability scientist. And today I want to talk about sustainability and what that means to me and how we all, as a research community, and as actors, citizen actors, can think about pursuing sustainability. Since I'm using the term, I think we should probably start with this question of, you know, what exactly do we mean by that? So, you know, the question is, what does it mean? And there's so many different uses, this term is in the air, so many different uses that some people would say it's a corrupt term. It doesn't have any real meaning. So, you know, why are we using it? But I actually think there's a there there. If we think about who uses it, could I have the next slide, please? It's, you know, corporations use sustainability all the time. They have sustainability leaders and sustainability programs. They originally, I think thought about it as a part of a three-legged stool where decisions needed to include attention to economics and social issues as well as environmental. Today's sustainability is ESG. It's environmental social and governance concerns that corporations all around the world are fully engaged in. Why do they do this? Next slide, please? They do it in part because it saves a lot of money. Early on, I think there was a big push to reduce energy use, to reduce water use, materials use, reduce the environmental consequences of it, but also save a lot of money. But today there are many other reasons, including many would say that this is key to attracting and retaining the most motivated employees. But I think corporations also do it based on caring about their communities, about their stakeholders, their consumers, as well as their employees and people all in their communities and around the world. Next slide. Oh, there we go. So another community that uses the term sustainability is the development community, the international development community of nations and development banks and NGOs and foundations that are trying to help the poorest places on the planet develop economically and socially. Back in 1987, Gro Bruntland led the World Commission on Environment and Development, and they concluded that all the effort to improve people's lives is really important, but we can't do it by compromising the well-being and the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And that's launched a whole set of development agendas, sustainable development agendas. We had Kofi Annan's achievable agenda, then we had the Millennium Development Goals. Today we have the SDGs. Next slide. The Sustainable Development Goals, 17 of them. They work on a whole range of different issues. You can see number seven is clean and cheap energy and number 13 is fixing the climate problem. All of these interact with each other, but they tend to be pursued one at a time. Next slide. And then we have the sustainability activities that happen in all of these other non-governmental institutions and in some governments like Sustainable Stanford. We are a world leader in sustainability in terms of how our institution here operates. And I'm sure many of you will have at some point a chance to see SESI and to understand our really advanced energy systems here, but we pay a lot of attention to water, transportation, lots of other issues. And partly because we're trying to reduce our environmental footprint, but partly because we care about the well-being of this community here and around the world. And Stanford is not the only university, tons of them are. So given these different perspectives, I think there is a common theme and it is something about the well-being of today as well as the future, the well-being of people. And of course there's a recognition in all of this that we need our planetary life support systems in order to achieve that intergenerational well-being. So my definition for sustainability and the one that many of us use is in the next slide, it's intra and intergenerational inclusive social well-being. It's a totally anthropocentric perspective and yet environment resources come into it in a serious way and I'll get to that in a minute. I want to focus on just for a second, inclusive. What does that mean? It means for everybody, not just for the wealthiest, not just for the rich countries. And so there's an incredibly important justice and equity and equality set of concerns embedded in this definition. Next slide. So if well-being, if intergenerational inclusive well-being is the goal of sustainability, what does it mean? And there's lots of debate and discussion about this actually, a lot of different perspectives on it. But most perspectives include at least the meeting the needs of people for energy and for water and for food and for shelter and clothing, the material needs of people. But also health, education, the opportunity to choose what we want to do, freedom from fear and conflict, those are all aspects of well-being. And given that, we can ask, next slide, what, how are we doing with that? And I'll just say very quickly that, you know, there's a lot of problems still that we've made progress, lots of progress. More people have access to modern forms of energy than ever before, electricity, kilocalorie consumption on average has increased around the world, a decline of infant mortality rates, dramatic decline in the mortality rates of women and childbirth. Most kids can read today and so on. So real, real improvement. Next slide. And maybe the best way to look at this is to look at life expectancies at birth. It's kind of the overall indicator of well-being. And you can see between 1950 and 2010 in this figure, it's got life expansive and increased everywhere. And today in the wealthier parts of the world, people are living on average more than 80 years. But the other thing you can see from this graphic is the incredible disparity that the world still experiences with the poorest places, including a lot of the Sub-Saharan African nations having more lifespans of, you know, 50 years or so on average. So huge disparity here. Next slide, please. And when we look beyond that, you know, there's still a lot of adults who can't read, mostly women. There are maybe a billion people who don't have access to sanitation or to electricity. More than a billion people who go to bed hungry a lot of the time. And there is that widening disparity between the rich and the poor, lots of evidence of that. And we are still growing. We're at 7.8 billion people on the planet and we're still growing. So let me just take a second to talk about population and then and consumption. And then I want to move on to so what, how do we think about this? So our human population, humans have been on the planet for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, our close ancestors for millions of years before that. But we only started growing maybe 8,000 years ago. And it was because we began doing settled agriculture, domestication of animals and so on. But and by 1800, we had a billion people on the planet. And then everything took off. Everything changed. And by the 1920s, we had two billion. And by the 1950s, we had three billion people on the planet. And as I said today, 7.8, that happened because we learned a lot of things, how to do things better during the industrial revolution, decline in mortality rates. But birth rates did not decline at the same time. There was a lag. So what we have, oops, can I go back for just one second? We have a what I see when I look at this graphic is a mad scramble. Just imagine how fast now population grew and how much we had to work hard as a global community to try to meet the needs of all these people. And I think that that mad scramble, one unintended consequence, next slide, has led us to these problems that we have right now. Now, you know, we've certainly known about these for a while and we understand them now. But the beginning of that mad scramble, we were just trying to meet people's needs. But today, our life support systems are in serious decline. And that sets up the sustainability challenge for future generations. Next slide. You know, where we are leveled off as a human population, our consumption is increasing. And oh, I should say, we are leveling off, probably hitting around 11 billion by the end of the century. Consuming more in some places because we need to consume more in others because we're over consuming. But our challenge when we talk about sustainability. Next slide is meeting the needs of people today. Yes. But also doing it in a way that allows us to meet those, you know, that those coming generations on out past 2100. So next slide. So how do we do that? And I think it's, it's pretty challenging because we really live in complex systems, so we have lots of players, lots of components interacting with each other. We're working at local to global scales. It's, it's very, very challenging. But I believe systematic frameworks can help. And I'm going to present one such from a book from a research, basically, and book that I did with Bill Clark at Harvard and Christopher Anderson at Colorado. Okay, next slide. So here's the framework. We have the top, we have the goal of intergenerational well-being, inclusive well-being and the constituents are listed there. Next slide. We, in order to achieve that, we have a whole bunch of production and consumption processes that need to take place. And we know how they're done really, really matters. And there are actors, there are individuals, corporations, governments, non-governmental organizations of all sorts who are acting to get that done and have the agency to make a difference in how it's done. Now, we could spend the entire year just focusing on these production consumption processes with respect to energy. And I imagine many of you will. But what I want to do today is just identify the fact that there's a set of underpinnings to that. Next slide. There are a set of resources, both human-made resources and natural resources that underpin our ability to meet those, that goal. And next slide. I refer to them as assets and call them capital assets. A lot of, a lot of people do. And they include at least these five really big groups. Big groupings of assets, human capital, and that's just the people of the place, the numbers, the accumulated knowledge, the age distribution, the level of health, all of these things that allow humans to be actors in this system and to, and to, you know, be effective. Social capital, those are the arrangements we make. Cultural, social, political arrangements and governing. This is our governance systems, its trust, its networks, its partnerships and so forth. Manufactured capital, everything we make. All of our technologies, all of our infrastructure, our art and books and so forth would fit in that category too. Natural capital is everything the planet offers us. All of our mineral resources and our water and climate system and our atmospheric systems and the species and ecosystems on land and in the oceans that give us so many things that we need and that future generations are also going to need. And then we include knowledge capital in this, in this framework. And that's the kind of stuff that we do here at Stanford, but it's also experiential knowledge, knowledge learned from practice over long times, knowledge learned from ancestors, traditional knowledge. So all of these things ultimately have to be in good shape in order to achieve those, the sustainability goal of inclusive well-being. If they decline, if they're gone, or if they, you know, never, if they don't exist in a particular place or situation, it's very, very hard to meet those goals. Next slide. So I want to suggest that it would be helpful for all of us as individuals, as individual actors, and as researchers to keep remembering this, that all of these things have to be in play. Many of us are working in one particular area, you know, it might be, you know, new technologies and energy or it might be policies, and that's great. Nobody can do everything, but keeping in the back of your mind that all of these things have to work together in order to achieve our goals is actually, I think a useful, a useful thing to do. And I want to give a very quick example of that. Next slide. Using, well, first of all, let me say this is not an easy thing to do. We do live in these complex adaptive systems, feedback, trade-offs, scale issues, etc. So this is not simple, but a framework is useful in that it's like a checklist. It's, it just helps us remember that the one thing we happen to be engaged in is only part of the puzzle and we have to be part of a partnership at least as actors in the system, part of a partnership that considers them all. So I want to apply this for a situation called the Green Revolution. And this is an area that I've worked in, in my own research world, so I'll tell that story. So back in, I'm sorry, I can't turn these slides, but back in, next slide. In the 1950s, a group of researchers, demographers, and so forth, realized that, you know, human population was growing very, very quickly. And the way we were doing agriculture at the time was not going to be producing enough food fast enough to meet those needs. And so those research community began working with foundations and governments to create some investments, some new capabilities that would allow the researchers to improve natural capital. So new ways of doing agriculture, next slide. And that happened. We, our research communities developed new high-yielding varieties of cereals, new machinery, industrial fertilizers, irrigation systems, whole new management approaches that never existed before. That was creation of new kinds of potentially manufactured capital. Next slide. We also saw an investment in that. Nations and again, corporations and NGOs and foundations really, foundations played a huge role, encouraging the development of that manufactured capital through different kinds of investments to new companies and so forth. Luckily, people didn't forget natural capital. Next slide. Recognizing that all that new manufactured capital needed to be used, the farmers and the other managers of this new agricultural approach needed to have education at their fingertips. And so new training programs, new whole new universities and university programs were developed in that, as well as extension and lots of other advice-giving approaches. So now we had a nice system that was working together. And next slide. The result of that was that food production more than kept pace with human population growth during this very, very rapid period of population growth. Big successful statement. Next slide. However, while they were doing that, natural capital wasn't part of the mix. I think there was almost an assumption that nature was there to be used and deforestation, conversion of lands to agriculture, land degradation, air and water pollution and water overuse and climate impacts and so forth were a consequence of really not paying attention to what the implications were for natural capital. I can say there were also some implications for human and social capital, but let me just move on. Once we realize this, we realize we have to do things differently because it's not sustainable. So today, when I look at agricultural research and agricultural efforts around the world, the focus is on sustainable agriculture. Now thought of a lot as regenerative agriculture. And so it's a different picture. But we could have avoided the problems if we'd been thinking about all of these together in a linked way. Next slide. Well, there are lots of other examples of failures, of situations where we failed to notice, failed to pay attention to one of the capital assets when I say we as the members of our community actors and actor groups sought to improve the lives of people. There's great stories about technologies, for example, that were really superb ideas, new technologies that never got used because the social capital and the human capital were in place or actually didn't fit, for example, with cultural needs. And likewise, wonderful new policies that should have been great, but had unintended consequences because all of these assets were not being considered. So again, I would argue that we would all be better off if we could apply this framework. Again, it's a checklist. It's not going to be proof of anything. It's not going to assure that we'll not get things wrong. But it will help us do a better job of it. And as we come into, you know, our time at Stanford, keeping your eye on that whole system of changes that need to be made together is useful. One last word and I'll wrap up and take any questions. What we can ask, you know, so how do we, if we're again, we are actors, we're part of the system, we're trying, we're not top down decision makers, we're members of communities trying to make a difference in this for intergenerational human well-being. We're trying to sustain all of those capital asset groups, including natural capital for the benefit of people over the long term and the short term. How do we do that? Well, I think we really have to do all these things that, you know, design, implement, measure, evaluate, monitor, learn, adapt. We have to do all of those things over time. Next slide. And as we do it, be open-minded, learn from what doesn't work as well as what does work because we are working in complex systems. It takes a lot of humility, but I think building in our ability to learn and is an essential thing for sustainability efforts to work. So I thank you with that. And if there are any questions or comments, I would be very happy to engage with you. Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation. So I was wondering throughout, throughout much of your presentation, you were mentioning that it almost seemed to imply that you were trying to inspire others to meet these sustainability goals almost just for the good of mankind, which I think 119 of us would agree is a reasonable approach. But have you run into barriers and roadblocks in trying to convince people of action or even to convince them to agree with that framework where they're just doing, they're just trying to meet sustainability goals for the good of mankind? And if you have, how do you, like how do you communicate with them to try to get them to see your perspective? Like I know that you who do this just to meet these goals, it doesn't have to have economic benefits, even though many times it does. Yeah, thank you. There's lots of different ways I can answer that, but I will say just, you know, one of the reasons I teach a course called pursuing sustainability and one of the reasons I teach it here at Stanford is because there are so many bright engaged people who do care about sustainability. They do care about improving the lives of people and also protecting the environment. And they want to act for that, they want to do something. And I love that, I love that about Stanford. I guess there's more and more of the case in other universities too. And that means people are focusing on, you know, they really would like to create new technologies. They're, you know, working on solar, working on batteries, working on a whole range of different technologies in the energy world is an example of that. There are also a lot of people who are saying, you know, I really want to focus, I'm getting this law degree so I can really help make regulations in to address, you know, climate change or other things that they're caring about sustainability too. So there's lots of us who care, but I think what I believe is that doing your one thing is really important to being an expert in that one thing, but you will be more successful as a member of society or the long run if you're doing that one thing with the recognition that you're part of a much great, you have to be part of a much greater whole to get it achieved. And I see this play out, you know, in corporations. There are big corporations who truly really want to make a difference in sustainability. They want to be in that game, but they are completely ignoring a piece of effort that needs to happen. They may not be the ones to do it, but they need to at least know who is. You know, many corporations won't ever engage in policy issues. That's fine. But if they're all their efforts, for example, to reduce, you know, greenhouse gas emissions or to use new technologies to use water more efficiently or whatever, if all of that's going on, and there's nobody out there trying to help change the social capital, you know, the governance systems in the policy world to facilitate that, it won't happen. So again, just it's a way of thinking about it more than anything else. And I have, I've not found anybody who says that's ridiculous. I mean, it's a pretty simple statement in a way, right? It's just that we don't often think about it until we, we are sort of reminded that we're part of a much more complicated system, and that we ought to be keeping our eyes open on what's happening, who our partners are, who we might want to be engaging with. If some of you become, you know, corporate leaders or leading research in different unit, in different kinds of organizations, you might be wanting to ask that for your own, for the, for the organization you work with, who else is our partner? And where do we need partners? So it's a long answer to your question, but it's a good one. It's, it's not, not a surprising kind of framework. But it's amazing how we don't often think about it. So that's, that's my whole goal here. Professor, we also have a question from Kasim Zafar, who's asking, what are some of the most surprising correlations or causations that you've noticed in terms of sustainable agriculture? Sustainable agriculture? Okay. Well, I mean, I think that I believe that even, even that traditional industrial agriculture, that it has a lot of negative aspects to it. You know, it's the monoculture using high amounts of fertilizer, using a lot of water. I mean, there's, there's a whole series of challenges that agriculture was created as part of that effort, that quick effort to, you know, the mad dash basically that was needed in order to feed people. It certainly succeeded. But what I think is that first of all, we can change the way we do that for an immediate benefit, absolutely immediate benefit. I know through my own research that we can dramatically reduce, you know, nitrogen loss to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases as air pollutants to the water systems, just by how we do the management. It's a man, it's a, you know, manufactured capital, those management approaches really matter. But and that's in a way, a nice thing to know. Many of us want to go way past that want to go way into a really doing agriculture differently that is more resilient to climate change that, you know, reduces other unintended consequences. So it's, it's, I see this as again, there are many different things that we can do. There's not one right answer. And there's no reason to wait for the perfect one. We can make differences even by relatively small changes right now. And I think that's probably, probably true. It is good to have the big goals to go for the, the best, the best option. But, you know, we don't have to wait for the best, we can, we can take smaller steps at the same time that we're trying to really transform the whole way we do do things. And I know that's been a case in the energy world too. That's excellent. Lots of factors that interplay and lots of, you know, parameters to think about. Yeah. Right. It's, we're really, I mean, it's the other thing that's important about this is that this is a complex system that we're in. And so simplifying thinking about, you know, as though these are linear, you know, simple cause and effect kind of issues is, is maybe a mistake because for any one challenge that we have, there are lots of different factors interacting to cause it. And so it's not like you just tweak this one thing and you fix the whole system. It's that you really have to understand the more complex set of, of proximal and distal drivers that are, are causing the challenges that we're facing on the planet and then try to understand how they interact so that we can develop a more comprehensive systematic approach to fixing them. And I think we're in a good place at Stanford to kind of think about it holistically and see how the different things interact. I think that's kind of, you know, what we encourage students to do at Stanford during their journey here. So that's what I love about Stanford. It's true. We have the expertise and the interest to do that. And, and I think, you know, we have a lot of interdisciplinary opportunities and initiatives. It is an interdisciplinary challenge. And again, this does not mean that every individual has to be an interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary. And our disciplinary knowledge is really crucial to it. But ultimately, a lot of different kinds of knowledge have to come together in order to solve these. All right, on that wonderful note, Professor Madsen, we are at the end of our time. I thank you on behalf of all of us for joining us today. And we hope we will students will see you at many different, you know, events and seminars and courses over the course of their time here. So thanks once again. You're welcome. And just contact me if you ever want to talk any of you. So thanks a lot. Take care.