 Well, you can't correct the problem whether you're trying to fix your car until you diagnose what the problem is. And to me, the problem really has become this discrepancy between those Americans who have and those who have not. Because the American vision is born on a dream of equal access to opportunity. Yet when you have statistics whereby the average CEO makes 400 times as much as the employee where 1% of the population control $30 trillion of assets and the bottom half has more debt than assets, the moral and psychological impact of that is extraordinary. Welcome to Cambridge Forum, coming to you live from Zoom. I'm Mary Stack, the Director of Cambridge Forum and today we are honored to have with us a stellar intellect and remarkable human being. The well-renowned cultural anthropologist Wade Davis. Wade is joining us from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he holds the leadership chair in cultures and ecosystems at risk. Wade has been described as a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity. In recent years, his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Columbia, Banatou, and Mongolia. He has trekked from the Amazon to the Arctic, leading a truly illustrious life. His own degrees in anthropology and biology and a PhD in ethnobotany or from Harvard. In addition to writing 20 books, he has taken award-winning photographs and made documentary films. He's explored people, plants, and places all over the planet and was National Geographic Explorer in Residence for more than a decade. He has recently become honorary citizen of Columbia in 2018. Welcome, Wade. Well, that is a rather stunning CD. Well, thank you very much, Mary. But in addition to all these accomplishments, you have remained faithful to your commitment to the preservation of indigenous people and indeed the planet itself. I admit I was rather swept away when I read your article in August's Rolling Stone, which seemed to grab the whole world by the conscience and made a sit-up and take notice of a whole catalogue of seemingly unconnected historical events, but they were shocking and intriguing. So I wonder if we could just start by you telling us a little bit why you got so fared up to write this piece, which was entitled The Unraveling of America, How COVID-19 Signals the End of the American Era. Well, thank you very, very much, Mary. That article came about in a rather serendipitous way, and in a strange way, the story has become the story. Quite unexpectedly, the piece went viral, trending on the Rolling Stone website for over five weeks, which was unusual for a piece of journalism. It was viewed on the site by five million people. It had over 362 million social media impressions around the world, so clearly it hit a nerve. I had been asked to write about COVID from the very inception of the pandemic, and I resisted to do so because I really didn't think I had anything particularly new to say, and I was actually kayaking around a small little island here in British Columbia when I came back to shore and I ran into a physician friend of mine a brilliant woman, Trish Beatty, and I kind of blurted out to Trish, you know, COVID is not a story of medicine or mortality or morbidity. It's a story of culture, and she sort of lit up like a light bulb and said, wait, I've been trying to tell my colleagues that from the beginning. Because, you know, in many ways that article, although it's been in some quarters seen as critique of America or even a Canadian's critique of the United States, it's nothing of the sort. It's very much more like a family intervention. People forget, and we don't advertise that in the piece, that yes, I was born Canadian and I hold Irish and Colombian citizenship, but I also became an American. I married an American. My life was made in the States. My career could never have happened in a thousand years in Canada. My father-in-law was almost U.S. President, offered the vice presidency by Richard Nixon turned it down. My brother-in-law was a U.S. Senator. My daughter works for the Defense Department and my Senate law is an active officer in the U.S. Navy serving at the moment. So I love the United States and I admire it so much. And the piece is very much, I think, like a love letter. You know, it's like a family intervention where, you know, if you've got a troubled member of your family, the first step is to hold a mirror to their face to show them how far they've fallen. And I think that is the first step on the path of rehabilitation. Look, pandemics have come and gone in their lives. Sometimes they have extraordinary impacts. Obviously the Black death in the 14th century by wiping out half of Europe's population transformed the economic infrastructure leading to the peasant's revolt of 1381 which overthrew the medieval order and transformed European life for all time. By contrast, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 which killed millions of people including incidentally my own grandfather who walked out of this house in the morning was dead by the afternoon. It had a less impact only in the sense the mortality, tremendous as it was, occurred in the immediate wake of a war where by the entire world had somehow, not somehow for obvious reasons, had become in a sense numb to death. By the same token in the summer of Woodstock, 1969, people forget that as half a million kids swam around in the mud of that farmer's field and took drugs, 100,000 people died from the Hong Kong flu. In Berlin, they were using subway stations to store the corpses because the moors were overrun. But again, that was an era before international communication facilitated by the digital revolution and also a time when most Americans and indeed most people of the world had never been on a commercial flight. So the spread of the pathogen was not as ubiquitous. But what happened here is that America woke up one day, Americans woke up to realize that they were literally living in a failed state. With 2,000 Americans dying a day, an American dying every minute of every hour of every day, ruled by a dysfunctional government led by an individual who was recommending the use of bathroom detergents to treat a pathology and an illness that he intellectually did not have the capacity to understand. And I think the Irish times put it best when they said, there have been many responses to America as it's reached its dominance in the wake of the Second World War. Love, hate, admiration, contempt, whatever. But no one's ever felt pity for the United States of America until the COVID crisis. And you know, empires come and go and no one anticipates their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. And, you know, the 15th century belonged to the Portuguese. We can look back and see that. The 16th belonged to the Spanish, the 17th to the Dutch, the 18th to the French, the 19th to the British. You know, the British Empire actually reached its greatest geographical extent in 1935, as late as that. You can just have this image of Brits in their tropical garb swirling gin and tonics in every corner of the world thinking that the empire was going to continue when we all now know that it was dead even before the Great War, but it certainly was in the wake of a war that left it bled white and bankrupt. And so as in the COVID crisis, as frontline workers waited in desperation for emergency air lists of fundamental supplies like swabs and masks and other essentials to come in from China, it's almost as if the hinge of history opened to the Asian century. And I think it's worth looking back and try to understand where this all came from and what is the explanation for America's frankly dreadful performance in the COVID crisis compared to countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Denmark, and other social democracies. You know, it's amazing to think that on the eve of World War II the United States of America was essentially a demilitarized society. In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, both Portugal and Bulgaria had larger armies than the United States of America and yet faced with that crisis within three years, 18 million men and women of America were serving in uniform. The industrial might of America literally saved civilization together with Russian blood. You know, the output of American material during that war defies imaginings. For every five pounds of equipment per capita that the Japanese Empire of the Sun got to a frontline troop in the Pacific War, the Americans got not 100 pounds, not 200 pounds, but two tons of material across 13,000 kilometers of water. The Ford Motor Company produced more industrial output than the nation of Italy. One factory in Detroit, the Chrysler's Detroit Arsenal, produced more tanks than the entire German Third Reich. It was said that a B-24 with 1.5 million parts could never be built on an assembly line. Henry Ford built Willow Run and produced them by the hour. We pumped out Liberty ships by the hour. The record for building a Liberty ship start to finish was four days, 29 hours and 17 minutes. We created so much industrial output that we didn't even think twice in sending half a million Studebaker trucks to the Russians. Over a million miles of copper wiring for radio phones, half a million radio sets for the field. Russian blood may have won the war in the east, but it was Russian soldiers marching into Berlin on boots made in America that advanced their armies as they did. And so in the wake of the war, with Europe prostrate and Japan in ashes, America emerged triumphant, 4% of the world's population, creating half the world's economy, creating 90% of the world's automobiles. And that concentration of wealth, that extraordinary affluence of a golden age of U.S. capitalism allowed for a truce between capital and labor that led to the famous Treaty of Detroit and a world of the weekend, the world of the middle class whereby a father with limited education could have a family, support a wife, as was the way of things in that decade, send his kids to good schools, public schools that were staffed and remarkable in part because of the subservience of women in that time, the only jobs available to women were clerical, secretarial and teaching. So those of us who grew up in the 50s had the finest teachers have ever existed, women who today are running corporations, serving on the bench, acting as neurosurgeons, they were our elementary school teachers. But the point is that a man could own a house, have his dignity and pride, own a vehicle, be out of debt and look forward to a bright future. Now the 50s was no golden era and those who look back on it nostalgically, look back to an America that never existed but have to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their contempt in a sense for some of the social movements that desperately needed to emerge from that era. An era that did see women in time go from the kitchen and the classroom to the boardroom and people of color from the woodshed to the White House and gay people from the closet to the altar. So the 1950s was no golden era, especially if you were a woman, gay or a person of color. But economically, it was more closely aligned to the Denmark of today than the America of today. Marginal tax rates were 91%. Now that doesn't mean that every wealthy person paid 90% of their salary, but that figure sent a signal that everybody pays, that everybody is involved. My father-in-law was a CEO of Bell and Howell Company through the 1950s and his salary would have been 20 times roughly that of a white-collared member of his staff. Today, that discrepancy would be more like $400 million. And one of the reasons that it's interesting, Mary, the response to my article, there's been two responses of these millions of emails that have flowed in. Those who are fundamentally sympathetic with the undeniable truth of the statistics in the piece feel kind of a sadness as I do, as anyone would do who loves America for what America has in fact become. And the other side are truly vitriolic, ad hominem, vicious tax. But the fascinating thing about the attacks is not only how they are singularly inarticulate and viciously angry with pejorative terms that I didn't know existed. I've been called everything from, you can imagine, menstrual discharge was one of them. The point is there's an interesting trend of misogyny in all of these critical rants, if you will. And I think I've been trying to figure that out because the article says very little about women and it's not about the women's movement in any way. But I think what is going on in America in part is that those very social movements that I just mentioned, the destiny of women changing, people of color changing, gay people changing, whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, however good or bad you think those trends may have been, they were absolutely revolutionary. They were the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And they occurred in the same generation, if you will, where working men lost their fundamental economic viability, where the jobs went abroad as for two generations, America celebrated globalization with iconic intensity when any working man or woman who lost their job in an assembly line knew that globalization was just a trumped up term for capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor. So wait, do you mind if I just interject here? You've raised so many important points and I'm sure we're going to have incredible questions. So this is a very bleak kind of portrait of a very uncivilized kind of society, you know, this great free democracy is very expensive and not terribly free for a lot of people. So A, is the situation irredeemable because it doesn't sound very promising in your article and secondly, what do you think are the real tenets of the civilized society? I mean, where do we go wrong? Why do we lose a sense of the vision? Well, first of all, you know, you can't correct a problem whether you're trying to fix your car until you diagnose what the problem is. And to me, the problem really has become this discrepancy between those Americans who have and those who have not because the American vision is born on a dream of equal access to opportunity. Yet when you have statistics whereby the average CEO makes 400 times as much as the employee, where 1% of the population control $30 trillion of assets and the bottom half has more debt than assets, where the three richest Americans control literally more money than the poorest 160 million Americans. And when a country that once spat out fighter planes by the hour can't manage to get masks and swabs to its frontline workers, the country that defeated polio and smallpox and led the way in medical innovation and experimentation finds itself led by a president advocating the use of disinfectants. The moral and psychological impact of that is extraordinary. A country that celebrated the free throw of information as the essence of democracy. The country that the founding fathers, Franklin, Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson always said education is more important than the Congress. Because without an educated electorate, you cannot have democracy. Without a free flowing press, you can't have freedom. And yet today America ranks as 45th in the world when it comes to press freedom. There are 15 American cities I could name that can't manage to graduate half of the senior class. So, you know, the discrepancies between the haves and the have nods has become so remarkable. And if you look through the anthropological lens at America, you know, this is a country that after World War II celebrated the individual with iconic devotion, allowing us great mobility and freedom, but at the cost of community and family. By the 1960s, divorce rates were approaching 50% or more. Only 6% of American homes have grandparents and grandchildren beneath the same roof. Our wisdom keepers are shunted off into these retirement homes of dubious quality. But we celebrate slogans of personal achievement. Workspace 24-7 implying total dedication to one's job at the expense of family. And then we wonder why the average American youth has spent three years by the age of 18 watching a video screen contributing to a BCD epidemic that your own joint chiefs of staff have called a national security crisis. And so here's a country that likes to think of itself as being blessed and happy, but it consumes two-thirds of the world's antidepressant drugs and the leading cause of death today for people under 50 in America is opioid addiction. So these aren't polemics. These are statistics. And so what and what has become of that and why and how did that become manifest in the COVID crisis? For example, on July 30th of this summer, on a day when the Americans announced 59,629 new cases of COVID, on that day in British Columbia, in Canada, where I live, again, we have a metropolitan population. Most of our population is in Vancouver and the lower mainland. We are an Asian city. We're two hours up the road from Seattle where the pandemic landed in America. At the time we had dozens of flights coming in every day from Asia and from China in particular. And yet on that day when America announced nearly 60,000 new cases of COVID in all of our hospitals in British Columbia, the whole province, which incidentally is larger than California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State put together, we had five cases of COVID in our hospitals. So what went on here that didn't go on there? And part of this is that the nations that were successful were nations where the people still believed in their institutions. Social democracy. Some kind of national cohesion, which we seem to have lost. In Canada, we are a free enterprise, dynamic capitalist system, as is every social democracy. But the idea of social democratic capitalism is not the ascendancy of the few, but the benefits being available to the many. Every tier of the society is lifted by the entrepreneurial zeal of the country. This is a country in Canada where we recognize that the measure of wealth in a civilized society is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but the strength of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect everybody in common purpose. Our healthcare system, for example, like our country in general, is by no means a perfect place or a perfect system. But it is a system that worked in this instance because fundamentally, our healthcare system is focused on the collective, not on the individual, and certainly not on the private investor who views every hospital bed as if it was a rental property. I try to explain that Mary in an allegory, if you will, that is in the Rolling Stone article. When you get your grocery stores in the States from Massachusetts to California, and most points in between, there is a kind of a social, economic, educational, class, racial chasm between you and the checkout person that can be very difficult to bridge. In Canada, you don't feel that. And it's not like you feel necessarily like a peer with the person at the till. And you may be less affluent, more educated, less educated, but you do feel a sense of being part of a common community. And the reason for that is very simple. You know that they know that they're getting a living wage because of the unions. And secondly, you know that they know that your kids probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Public schools, incidentally, that are not funded by local property taxes, which invariably favor the children of the affluent communities, but by block government grants that give every kid the same per capita resources, giving every child, no matter what the socioeconomic background of their family, the same chance to go to a good school and advance their lives through their education. And the third thing, of course, is that the person at the till knows that you know that they know that if their kids get sick, they will really get the same medical care as you and your kids, but more importantly, the prime minister's kids. And that's really true. And those three strands woven together become the social fabric of Canadian democracy. And that's the solidarity that allowed the country to respond, as it did, to this particular crisis. So we've got a question here. It all sounds to me like, you know, we had this country that was kind of founded on this rugged individualism, which kind of went, ran a mark in the 60s and then beyond. Now we have the Jeff Bezos of this world. We have a president that kind of celebrates the differences. How are we going to change things? Urs is tight to question here. Where do we go from here? Well, I mean, there's a lot of, there are a lot of things to point out there, Mary. First of all, American, in a sense, invented social democracy. It was called the New Deal. And America is, has always swung back and forth between extremes. That's one of the great irresistible elements of the country. It's the best of all things and the worst of all things, you know. And the thing that I think that really set America off is when people started running against government, it just seems so intuitively contradictory. The government is of the people, by the people. If you define as Reagan did, the government is being the source of all of your ills, it's kind of, it's almost like, psychotic if you think about it. You know, I would maintain, for example, those in favor of building a wall across the American, the Mexican border aren't just sort of indulging a hateful gesture or economically pointless exercise. In a strange sense, if you think about it, they're committing an act of treason. Because what is treason? Treason isn't just the selling of state secrets to an enemy. It's when you indulge actions and push agendas that are corrosive to the very heart and essence of what the nation is. And of course, immigration has always been fraught in America. Every new group has had to clots way on short. None has ever been welcomed with roses. But the opportunity has been there and the myth has been there. And remember that myths are not old tales. Myths, as Joseph Campbell said, are moral charters. And that inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, I don't care when it was put there. We welcome the huddled masses. And so when these gestures occur, when Oscar Wilde said that America was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization, it was a clever quip. And it was a cruel statement. But there's an element in the behavior of the American system today in which people don't really even believe in community. They hardly believe in society. A country that once gave us Walt Whitman and the Grateful Dead and Abraham Lincoln, who celebrated charity for all and malice towards none, is now led by someone who, unlike George Washington, who couldn't tell the truth, you now have a president who literally, who couldn't tell a lie, you now have a president who literally can't recognize the truth and who celebrates malice towards all and charity toward none. And when the American people flock to the beaches, define medical science, they're not only celebrating freedom. They're actually displaying the weakness of a people and a society that lacks the stoicism to endure the pandemic or the fortitude to defeat it. By the same token... The ability to protect their neighbor. I mean, that lack of... Well, that brings up another point, Mary, that this focus on self, the obsession with self. You know, in 2016, the most disturbing thing about that election is not, in my opinion, that Hillary Clinton won a greater percentage of the popular vote and was denied, or that even Trump was elected. What the haunting thing is, that 62 million Americans, who by no means are a monolith, by no means are they stupid, they did have one thing in common. They were prepared to vote their indignation, to vote their personal anger. Now look, in elections, we all pick sides, we all like someone more than another person. Obviously, a personal response is part of your decision-making, but also policy, the strength of the country, its role in the world. All of these things should be part of your decision-making process when you cast that vote. And certainly, if I didn't like a president who I knew was gonna maintain world peace, and I loved a presidential candidate who risked putting the country on a war footing for no reason, I would swallow my pride and vote for the person I didn't like. And the very fact that 62 million people voted purely their indignation, voting for someone that they very clearly knew lacked all credentials for that position, the toughest job in the world, save for his willingness to validate their hatreds, to target their enemies real and imagined. I think the fact that 62 million Americans, which in terms of the people that actually vote, is coming damn near close to half the voters of America, were prepared in a sense to throw away their vote to satisfy their anger, as opposed to thinking of something bigger than themselves, is a sign of decadence. And you ask what can America do about this? Well, obviously, there's much that can be done about it. The return of the fairness doctrine to encourage media to tell stories objectively and fairly, with both sides of the story truly being represented. There's so many things I don't even know where we could begin. The thing is, if you look at, this is our last point before we have to segue to other matters you want to discuss, but if you think about the situation four years ago, which sounded pretty dire, that you managed to have these people electing a candidate with no previous political experience, failed business experience, very big presence as a fake show host, in the role of a citizen to get him in the White House. First of all, how do we get him out of the White House when people are now even less informed, less willing to trust the press, less willing to really trust their own beliefs than they were for it? Well, I mean, there are two points to be made. One is that no matter who wins in November, the chasm that divides America will not be healed. The challenge is to, and the greatest impact of this presidential era has been the reduction of the truth to an opinion, where if I believe it, it's true. And again, that has been exasperated both by the bubble of media, where those who watch CNN have one worldview, those who watch Fox News have another, and diametrically opposite worldview. And it's exasperated by the fact that most Americans, in fact, don't get their news from either source, they get it from Facebook, where the algorithms are designed to bring eyes across a site, not to distinguish content. And as long as that is going on, you just reinforce all these mechanisms to reinforce our isolation amongst those who believe as we do. And that's not healthy in a democracy. Calls have just come in here. Two, one, how do we redistribute income now that 1% has so much power, says Diana Dill. So that's one question. Secondly, how has the Koch family funding for over 25 years, the Tea Party candidates, the killing of the Fairness Doctrine, and other strategies of the Republican Party, been the primary force setting up the divide, is there, i.e., there have been strategies set out to divide us and they've been well funded? I mean, I think, I mean, I can only sort of say that one thing that has to be there has to be a crackdown on tax evasion. I mean, you know, the divide's not just an economic divide. It's a divide of fairness. It's like people, when people don't feel they're getting a fair deal, it generates resistance and anger and frustration and bitterness. And you know, it's just not right for tax, for individuals and corporations to be able to use these tax dodges. I mean, either a flat income tax or some kind of mechanism that will close these egregious loopholes. And part of that is getting the money to the extent that you can out of politics. And the problem is, I mean, our politics in a place like Canada are poisoned by money as well. But our elections come and go in six weeks, whereas yours seem to be interminable. And just sort of a million things like that. I mean, universal healthcare. Americans don't seem to understand that universal healthcare is not about medicine. It's about solidarity. It's about feeling that I'm part of something. I'm not being left out. I'll tell you one beautiful story that maybe more than any amount of statistics will illustrate this difference. Mary, when my mother was 85, living alone at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning, she got a headache. By two o'clock that afternoon, she was being prepped for neurosurgery, having suffered a severe aneurysm. By the time my sister and I got to the ICU, she was in recovery. And right beside her in a bed was a little girl from Manitoba from a Mennonite family surrounded by a dozen people. And she by chance had suffered the same ailment, had the same treatment, had her life saved by the same brilliant immigrant Indo-Canadian neurosurgeon. Now, it was a very moving moment because my sister and I could have afforded to pay for that service. My sister is a prominent lawyer. I've done well. But that family, in other circumstances, would have been forced to make a choice between the well-being of their daughter and the economic viability of their family. And in Canada, we say that that is not a choice that in the civilized nation, we believe anybody should have to make. Now, by chance in the city where that hospital was, our provincial capital of Victoria, the fanciest hotel, the Empress Hotel, the Fairmont Hotel downtown, has a deal where any Canadian family member with a family member in an intensive care unit gets a free room for the night. So that evening, we all poured back down to the bar in the Empress Hotel. Now, the Mennonites don't drink. So I bought them juice and tea all around and had a glass of beer, and my sister had a glass of wine, and we toasted. And we didn't toast our loved ones happy as we were that they had survived. We didn't even toast the brilliant neurosurgeon, this kind man who had saved their lives. We toasted our country because it was our country that allowed this moment to happen. Two families from opposite sides of the economic, educational, religious spectrum, if you will, coming together as one with huge amounts of gratitude, not just that our loved ones were alive, but that our country had looked after all of us together in that moment of need. And to me, that is the most perfect moment I've experienced of our muted Canadian patriotism. You know, we don't really wave the flag in Canada. We didn't even have one until 1965, and then we came to a standstill fighting over one or three Maple Leafs. The most perfect expression of our muted patriotism is a line of Franco phone verse that says, mon pays n'est pas un pays à l'hiver. My country is not a country, it's the winter. And yet there is this quiet pride in the solidarity of who we are, in the strength of our institutions. And of course, it's not a perfect place, but just look at how Canada responded. You know, David Frum wrote an interesting piece about going back into Maine from the Maritimes and how the U.S. customs, nobody was wearing masks. Nobody asked him anything about where he was going. The standard questions, do you have alcohol or cigarettes? But if you come into Canada, as my daughter did, and my daughter came back and she works for the Defense Department, she had to go into quarantine. My wife and I weren't allowed to pick her up at the airport because we're over 65. She had to be left a car. She had to tell the customs people what her plan of quarantine was, what her contacts were. The health authorities contacted her three times in that fortnight. Had she not responded to those calls, the police would have come. Not because we live in a police state, but we live in a state where we're prepared to listen to the medical authorities and follow their guidance, knowing that they know more than we do and certainly more than our politicians do. And because of that, we have the COVID rates we do versus what you have in the states. And this isn't really rocket science. And there are ways to regenerate the dream of America, you know, to focus on... Look, you know, in the wake of World War II, tragically, having been a demilitarized society before the war, in the wake of the war, America never stood down. We today have troops in 150 countries. Since 2000, we have spent at least $6 trillion on war, money that could have been invested in infrastructure. China during that time since the 1970s has not once gone to war. We've never been at peace. And they've been building their infrastructure, pouring more cement every three years than America poured in the 20th century. So in other words, there are clear solutions that could bring the country together. I mean, if you think of just little Costa Rica, great example to us. One of the highest quality of life indexes gave up their military so that they could reinvest the money in health and education. Well, I mean, look, America's military authority has been essential. I mean, let's not forget, there was a Cold War to be fought. Ronald Reagan was quite right when he described the Soviet Union as an evil empire. But it's come at a tremendous cost. And it's time to pay attention to home. We have to crack down on tax evasion. The American definition of freedom has become the right of an individual to own a personal arsenal of weaponry that trumps even the safety of children in our schools. Look, I own six guns. I have hunting rifles and shotguns and bird guns. Not one of them is registered with the government, but not one of them is designed to kill people. I wouldn't even think of buying a submachine gun or a clandestine handgun, because those are not what hunters need. I mean, I'm a hunter. And by the same token, I mean, you can go, I mean, how great if we could just legalize drugs to kill the criminal element and to liberate our prisons and to send a message to the Black people, African-Americans are 30% of your population and over 60% of the inmates in federal penitentiaries, mostly for petty drug crimes. Drug crimes, you know, I mean, what about, what about a finally a kind of a national period of service where every young man and woman in America had to come together for a year or two and do something for someone else, you know, bringing together people from all walks of life and all regions, urban, rural and bringing them together to actually help other Americans. What if your elections were reduced in scale? And I mean, if there is, you realize some congressional races in America involve more money on both sides than federal national elections in total in Canada? It's just unbelievable. It's unbelievable. I want to just end that discussion of the unraveling of America by saying that nobody in the world would rather me to be proven wrong in my prognosis than myself. I love the United States and trust me, this is a country that at one point in our lifetime of our own, my father literally saved civilization and if and when the torch of history does indeed pass to China with its treatment of ethnicities, its contempt for democracy and a free press, its expanding aggressive militarism around the world, we will certainly be nostalgic for the best years of the American century. So I'm going to thank everybody for taking part, thanking Wade first in today's Cambridge Forum with a well-renowned cultural anthropologist, author and explorer, Wade Davis, who has been described as a rare combination of scientists, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity. He joined us today from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver where he holds the leadership chair in cultures and ecosystems at risk. So thanks everyone for your support. I will see you all in two weeks. Goodbye for now.