 Okay, and we are live. Welcome everyone. Welcome to everyone who is in this Zoom room and also everyone on the live stream. My name is Chantal Bilodeau. I am one of the co-curators of the green rooms and I'm really happy to have you with us. If you were with us earlier at some of the sessions this afternoon, we appreciate you sticking with us because it's now the fourth one. So it's many hours of staring at a computer screen. And if you were with us right before this, I want to acknowledge that this was a very between a conversation between Sarah and Ravi. Very powerful moving and honest conversation and something that I keep with me in my heart and that I will be thinking about for a very long time. So now we are moving to, as I said, the fourth session of the second day of the green rooms. We started yesterday and we have one more session tomorrow and two more later tonight for those of us who are on the East Coast. The green rooms are produced by English Theatre at the National Arts Centre and presented by Fulda in collaboration with the Canada Arts Council, the City of Kingston, the National Theatre School and HowlRound Theatre Commons. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that the mission control for this event is located in Kingston, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Anash Nabi and the Haudenosaunee and the Huron Wandaat. Kingston is covered by Treaty 57 and the territory was acquired in 1783 in Crawford's purchase. Now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Tom Green, an ecological economist who focuses on climate issues at the David Suzuki Foundation. Tom is going to talk about what role the economy can play in reverting the climate crisis. Please feel free to use the chat to come in along the way and there will be a formal Q&A section at the end of the talk. Here's to you, Tom. Thanks very much, Chantal. I'm very, very delighted to be here today and join you. And so thanks to Chantal, Sarah, Megan, Sophie and all the others organizing this. And it's just really terrific to be part of this event. I would never have become an ecological economist if I hadn't thought the planet was in such dire straits. I would have probably gone into the arts in some way, maybe theatre or creative writing. But I just felt that this was a place where I could have the most leverage because the economy is so influential in what humans do. And economic theory, as I'm going to go through in this talk, is having a very large impact on our ability to address climate change and on the kind of things that drive society. So with that, I'd like to give you a little presentation that I'm very open for questions. And also as an experiment, I have also made a place on a Google presentation where you could meet and add thoughts, questions, observations. And so I can see if I can share that here. So maybe at the end, I just sent that privately, apparently. Maybe, Megan, you can send that out. All right, so I'm going to share my presentation now and look forward to your questions. All right, so what I want to give you some insights from ecological economics. What a lot of people don't realize is that there are different schools of economic thought. And mainstream economics is what tends to be used by business, by government. But it's a, and it has a long and storied history, but there are minority views within economics that are very critical of that perspective and feel that it is bringing us great problems. I'm really pleased to speak to you today from the unceded, co-sailish territories, the territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Slewa to the United Nations. And given the moment we're in and everything that's been happening south of the border and now around the world on on black life matters and all the police violence and here I am a white middle-aged guy speaking about economic theory, which has largely been the domain of white privileged middle-aged men. So I just want to acknowledge that from the start that, you know, I'm coming from a bit of a problematic position here. And one thing that I think is quite appalling is that the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, which isn't really a real economics Nobel Prize, she won in 2009. And since then there's only been one other woman who's won and that was 2019. So let's see how that's influencing the kind of economic theorizing that's happening. The great thing about Eleanor Ostrom from my perspective is she also contributed to the ecological economics literature. So she was critical of some of the things we're going to see ahead. Now governments focused on economic growth after World War II and why did they do that? Before the war, it created a lot of employment, wages kept growing up, businesses were very busy, and then they were very worried that the economy would shrink, there would be unemployment, there would be social strafe. So the US Council of Economic Advisers came up with this solution, which was that the state should keep ensuring that the overall national US economy would grow. And with that, it would mean that there'd be jobs, tax revenues, profits, and social harmony because if the pie keeps growing, you don't have to argue about how big the individual slices are so much. So let's look at the good news from an economics perspective of the last, especially since the 1950s. If we look here, especially if you look at the box, the top middle one, real GDP, that's the size of the economy. And we can see this remarkable phenomenon, this is the global economy just grows incredibly. As does things like fertilizer consumption, paper production, transportation, telecommunications, international tourism. Economists, all these things suggest incredible amount of economic success over the last century. Now the problem is the ecological indicators in this second graph show a lot of the biosphere is under increasing stress, particularly since the 1950s, we see this great acceleration, for instance, in the level of carbon dioxide of methane, ocean acidification, forest loss. So this is no longer such a great success story when we look at it from an ecological perspective. From a social perspective, it's true that lifespans have improved over this period, and there's many indicators that have improved. What we see, especially in the last 30 years is a real increase in inequality around the globe, the rich are getting much richer, and everyone else is staying where they were at, or perhaps getting worse off. So if I were to think of this as a theatrical piece that might be performed on another planet to explain what went wrong with humanity. This is this 1972 study that I'm going to talk about is something for me it's a great tragedy of human history because this study comes out in 1972 and it basically shows that there's a big conflict between economic growth and a healthy biosphere and mainstream economists. As a chorus dismissed this, and so did the business press. And so, although it was initially very successful over 30 million copies of this study were read it was translated into various different languages, it was quickly dismissed and disappeared and the study I'm referring to is limits to growth. It was a report to the Club of Rome. And it was looking at the predicament of mankind of course with the language of the day. And it's interesting to think that some of the things that were worrying the members of the Club of Rome at the time have parallels to today. They were trying to understand these complex global interacting problems. And so they, they were seeking us team that would help them be able to understand that and there was a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that were using computer models to examine complex form interactions complex systems. And so they retained them and after they developed a model, which was much more complex than the typical economic model. They reported their findings in on March 2 1972 at the Smithsonian Institute. What they did with their model is first they gathered all the data they could find from 1900 to about the late 1960s, and use that calibrate their model to make sure that it, it, you know, represented these interrelationships in an incredible way. And then they ran their model forward to the year 2100. And what it showed is that if humanity pursued economic growth collapse would be very likely and I've just shown you one scenario here. They ran the model various times with different scenarios and this one's called the world model standard run. And basically under this scenario they just assumed that the world would continue as it was it would continue with this focus on economic growth. And that would be the main public policy imperative. So here we are at about 2020. And we're at this point where it suggests that industrial output starts to fall, and indeed shortly after that population starts to fall. So they're, they're finding, you know, here we have one of the key paragraphs from their, their book limits to growth will be reached sometime within the next 100 years so that would be by 2070. And unfortunately it means a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity and industrial capacity you can also understand by the size of the economy that the ability to to produce output that we use in our daily lives. And as I said, mainstream economists dismissed this study and continue to defend economic growth. It was described by some of the top economists and William Nordhaus here measurement without data he became co author of one of the most influential economics textbooks of the 20th century and so affected the thinking of thousands and thousands of people who went on to become business leader politicians, and so on. And in that textbook they very clearly dismissed this study. And I don't know how many of you ever have used Google scholar to look up a scholarly paper but when I did this in 2015. I did this, I looked up biophysical limits ecological limits or planetary boundaries in the American Economic Review which is one of the most prominent economic publications are academic journals and here we see that there was one result. In 1974 and it was actually written by the person who went on to found ecological economics, or one was one of the co founders Herman daily. Despite that, all the evidence that the earth is showing worsening environmental trends mainstream economists continue to be focused on wealth generation international trade and things like that. And they haven't, haven't looked at the ecological constraints that we face. So we've now had 48 years since that study was produced and so it's a good time to ask how well does it match up with their projections. Here, I just look at one indicator, and you can see their original pollution projection was the red line. And where we are is basically the orange line that's using CO2 as a proxy for pollution. And so we are basically slightly off the curve but really going in the wrong direction. A few years ago, 2016, the all party parliamentary committee on limits to growth in the United Kingdom, reviewed all the evidence and came to the conclusion that the limits were to grow through report of 1972 was very much. And the standard run what I've heard to which is basically just pursuing economic growth and not learning to adapt any of our policies to address things like climate change in any real way. That that's the path that we were still on so very concerning in that way. One thing I think it's important to understand is, despite all our efforts through different international climate accords protocols agreements. If you look at GDP here which is the size of the economy gross domestic product. That's the orange line. And if you look at emissions, it maps very, very closely to the size of the economy. Now you'll hear increasingly this idea that we can have cream growth that we can have green growth that we can. We can delink decouple the economy from emissions, but despite all our efforts to date on a global scale, we aren't succeeding. There are some countries that are doing better than others like the UK's emissions have come down quite a lot. But on a global scale, we're not making much progress. And as you know, we face this real challenge of fossil fuels and here we see two possible futures. The red and purple is much higher temperature range and depending on which pathway humanity chooses we either end up hotter than we are now and still a problematic level, or very hot with perhaps much of the tropics, basically uninhabitable. We also know that even if you didn't have the global warming problem, the fact that you burn CO2 and the CO2 goes into the ocean, it helps acidify the ocean, and eventually it makes it unsuitable for a whole bunch of marine ecosystems and species and so we could have collapse in that way. So mainstream economics is a roadblock to addressing climate change in that it has a few kind of fundamental founding beliefs you could say. First is that a healthy economy needs to grow, as I've discussed and we see that I mean there is a real aspect of that in that every time the economy starts to shrink. People do get laid off and there are all sorts of social implications. So there's an aspect in which that's true but that's because we've designed an economy that needs to grow in order to not throw people out of work. Another idea is that well being increases with consumption that wealthier societies take better care of the environment so actually we should focus on getting wealthier so we can we can address our environmental problems. And I think that biophysical limits to growth are an illusion because markets are very good at addressing scarcity you know if if bread starts to get scarce the price goes up more bakers produce bread people reduce their bread consumption switch to rice and there's no scarcity of bread. So that idea that you can apply that to the ecological level. There's problems though as I mentioned earlier this whole thing about well being improving very unevenly with economic growth. We have this worsening inequality and we have a problem of structural environmental racism. We have that 26 billionaires have the wealth of the 50% of the world bottom 50% of the world's population and the place where things like waste dumps industrial facilities that pollute tend to be placed is of course in racialized communities. This idea that richer societies take better care of the environment doesn't actually match up to the evidence very well because here we see this graph on one side is increasing co2 emissions. And on the right is increasing wealth and these are log scale so each time you go up one of those notches you're actually talking about 10 times more emissions or 100 times more emissions and likewise you're 10 times or 100 times more wealth wealthy. And what we can see is that Canada the US Australia are in the upper right, we are the wealthier countries and we are putting the biggest ecological footprint on the planet and I think you all knew that but you know here's the data to show it. So if we go to one of the first year textbooks that everyone reads to as they try and understand, learn about the economy. We see that Mancuk, one of the most influential textbook authors of the 21st century. He argues that economists aren't concerned about limits to growth because technological process fixes them. And he gets the example of, you know, it's possible to extract much more oil from the oil sands in Alberta than was once thought possible. But of course, extracting much more oil is about resources it's not about whether you're within the planetary boundaries and on this graph on the right which is from the Pemba Institute, you can see the crazy increase in emissions from Canada's oil sands. Basically, four times higher in 2020 than they were in the year 2000, which is really going so much in the wrong direction when we're in the middle of a climate crisis. One thing we're really frustrated with is that the models that mainstream economists use don't show the biosphere here we have firms and households trading money flows around the labor resources flow around. There's no representation of the biosphere. And here's the model that is used to understand economic growth, the size of the economy, we have capital and labor. You must be asking yourself, what am I doing after all these lovely artistic things talking about economics after a long day of Zoom meetings and I'm sorry, but I hope this is helpful. There's missing the environment. So ecological economists try to bring in a fuller picture, look at the economy as something powered by solar energy that extracts energy and resources from the biosphere that causes waste and pollution. And then there's feedback loops where the waste and pollution have impacts on biosphere, which affects the resources that we can use it may affect human health and so on as the limits to growth money showed, model showed. So we advocate for keeping a limit on the scale of the economy, in other words, the size of the economy relative to the biosphere. And that can be done by various ways and that's putting limits on where the economy can happen and what kind of activities can happen so that can be things like having protected areas respecting indigenous rights, shifting to renewable energy, taking a circular economy approach, and so on. Also very useful is to do things like four day work weeks, a better income redistribution guaranteed annual income. So there's not this pressure to have the economy grow otherwise people are going to be out of work. A few years ago, the 2009 a bunch of scientists came up with the idea of the planetary boundaries framework. And they looked at all the different things about the biosphere that we should really do our best not to disturb beyond a certain safe operating space because if we do we put our future in danger and we also reduce the quality of life and make it more difficult to create more challenges. So here we see that the different boundaries they have and some of them are already yellow. So in the, in the zone of increasing risk so climate changes in that category. And then we have flows of nitrogen are clearly beyond where they should be in a zone of high high risk and then some of these other boundaries have not been quantified. And so she talked about with who's used to be with ox, ox fam is a great economist from the UK. And she looked at not she said well there's something missing here and what's missing is that we don't have the social foundations. We haven't got in there the things that people need in order for well being. And so she talked about she introduced donut economics, and basically we want to be within that nice green donut there where we're meeting the social foundations we don't have a deficit so people are getting the needs for food, health, education, political voice, peace and justice, etc. met. And at the same time we're not exceeding the ecological ceiling. Clearly we're exceeding the ecological ceiling on climate change now. The good news is that this is now being applied in real world in we see it in New Zealand, Bhutan and recently Amsterdam as one reaction to the COVID pandemic is bringing in donut economics. And so this in New Zealand's well being budget is let's shift away from from trying to have an ever bigger economy and let's look at what gives people well being and a Bhutan a long time ago, the king said, let's go for gross national happiness, not gross national product. You're in the arts and many of you are in theater I just wanted to bring to your attention how much economics is about theater. Economists are put on stage to explain what goals matter, what the limits are to what society can afford, why we can't do certain things. And they're very powerful powerful in that way. To keep in mind the speed at which we have to transition in this to meet what the IPCC tells us is 1.5 degrees is kind of our safe limit of change. I mean anything is regrettable. You know if we could end up at 1.3 rather than 1.5 that would be better, but we're unlikely to come in any lower than 1.5 we'd be very lucky to be 1.5 because here you can see our annual emissions here from as a result of burning all those fossil fuels and how quickly we have to bring down those emissions. Basically we need to bring down carbon emissions by about 7% a year or more to meet that target. In the pandemic global emissions are likely to come down by about 6% over the course of the year globally. So we've got to reach 7% on an annual basis and we reached 6% by basically shutting down economies by stopping flying by really dramatically reducing how much we drive by reducing all sorts of activities and yet even with all that and I'm not arguing at all that that's the way we want to reduce emissions far from it. This pandemic is a tragedy and it's so unfortunate that we can't meet in person, but it just shows how hard it is going to be to bring down those emissions. So here I have Canada's emissions from 1990 to 2017 and you can see that they were rising up until about 2005 and then they kind of filled about various policies were introduced, but there's very little sign that we are bringing it down to the level that we need. Despite a lot of effort at the federal level to put in things like a price on carbon pollution to offer incentives to buy electric vehicles and now future plans to help transit authorities by electric buses so there are things that are helping that are that are happening that will be helpful. But a bigger part of the reason why we have this problem is because Canada's oil and gas sector is just so big and it's been growing its emissions. So we can see that sometimes people think that you know they've got to change how they do things. That's helpful but let's remember that it's not so much. The onus is not so much on individual action what we need is strong policies that steer the whole economy and that equitably make that shift to a decarbonized future. One policy that is never considered by government unfortunately is to focus on well being instead of economic growth because economic growth creates a greater challenge of bringing down emissions. If you're richer and richer every year and you're consuming more than you really have to use the cleanest cleanest technology to reduce overall emissions. If we didn't grow the economy but just try to stay at kind of a steady state, it would make our task much easier. I should have mentioned at the beginning of this that I'm giving my this talk on my own and not as a representative of the David Suzuki Foundation, but I couldn't resist grabbing this one slide from work I've done for the foundation where we summarized all the studies up to that were available up till 2017 on how to reduce Canada's emissions down by at least 80% by 2050. And what we found by looking across all these different studies is that there's very common themes. We learned to do less with do more with less energy, we have to produce more renewable energy, clean energy, and then really important is we have to swap out like fossil fuels and electrify just about everything. So if you think your, your house is heated with a heat pump. Sorry, a furnace now, it needs to be heated with a heat pump. Also the installation levels have to be improved. But number nine here is the one that wasn't actually in all those studies and that I added, and it's that really as a society we should be forgetting about growth or that should no longer be our focus it doesn't make sense we know it's not improving well being. So instead what we should do is seek to improve well being by living within the donor. So, I guess now is a good time to shift to Q&A so really happy to take your questions. And, oh I see now. I'm back with you. Tom, thank you for this great presentation. If anybody wants to put questions in the chat, we will read them out loud and Tom can try to answer some of them. Sure. Okay. I don't understand number six which was in your last diagram that you showed what does mobilize money mean. So, the idea is that if we are going to get ourselves off fossil fuels, we are going to have to as a society make big investments we are going to have to retrofit all the apartment buildings and homes and office buildings, commercial buildings across Canada, that's going to take a lot of money we're going to have to shut down coal fire generating stations and replace them with wind turbine solar panels. We are going to have to invest in charging infrastructure we are going to have to invest in, you know, electrified public transit. So, it's about moving a lot of money to where it needs to be and stop investing in the fossil fuel extraction. So the pension plan invests on our behalf in the oil sands quite heavily and also as a result of that lost quite a bit of money for us. We've got to really stop those kind of investments we've got to pressure our banks to stop investing in fossil fuels and switch to the clean economy so that's that's number six. And also two questions that have to do with how, like if we if we move away from growth, but the whole system is geared towards that how do we do that. And then how do we get mainstream economists and political leaders to get on board with a different kind of economy. Well there's, there's a joke that economics changes one funeral at a time. And unfortunately, there's a lot of truth to that. The economic elders of this society tend to hold the top positions they control who publishes in their journals, who gets promoted and so on. I don't worry so much about convincing mainstream economists. I think it's much more important to convince the public at large and to. That's why the work of Kate Raworth on donut economics is really, really, really, really helpful. It's about the public learning more about different ways of seeing the economy. And so, and it's about people demanding what a politician is there and they're saying you know, my party is going to give you more economic growth, saying well who cares about economic growth we want well being and we also don't want to screw over the biosphere. So, the second question was, we do have this economy that is geared to growth. How do we shift to something that isn't and not go through a period of like incredible economic disruption. And that is, that is a big challenge, but there are there are certain things that can be done for instance, I work at the David Suzuki Foundation we have a four day work week. It gives us more time to volunteer it gives us better mental health. You can make more stuff at home so you don't feel need to consume as much our income is more modest because we're in the nonprofit sector I'm sure lots of you know know about that. And that means we consume less and but but there's a trade off where we have increased happiness because of that because of that time. Right now the economy is very much geared much too much to the interest of people who own shares it's geared to the interest of the 1% and we have to take that back. And that requires the kind of mobilization the crowds of pushing for, you know, better policies. And I think one, one silver lining of the COVID pandemic is it has opened up the opportunity to to consider new ways of doing things. So for instance, Spain is going forward with the kind of guaranteed annual income approach where, you know, everyone gets an income. If they're employed unemployed you still got this income so that you don't have this situation where precarious workers or gig workers, COVID comes along and suddenly they have no source of income whatsoever. They had, they will set up this much more sensible way of doing things. And is it reasonable to think that, for instance, with the basic income, if you take care of people that way you can actually reduce a lot of your other governmental programs that are supposed to be there to help people in difficulty. Yeah, that that's very much true that. But that you reduce, say some of your social systems programs, because you've everyone's got a guaranteed income, but the great thing that's been found where there have been experiments around the world where this has been tried. The amazing thing is, let's say you have a single mom who under current system is not able to go back to school and really get new skills or something because, you know, they, they don't have the money set aside, and they can't afford childcare and so on. If they have a guaranteed income, they can actually use that to pay rent and food and. And then that allows them to go back to school so over the long run, they can be, you know, get back involved in in society in a, in a way that makes them feel more fulfilled and contributes. So you have a question also about the arts you touched a little bit in it in your presentation but the question is how do you see the role of the arts in ecological economics. Yeah, and that's a great question and I think one of the challenges is that, you know, logical arguments only take people so far and really, we're in such a precarious situation in that we have an economy that is basically the, the biosphere on which we all depend upon. So, but you know that the standard articles arguments and so on, are only reaching a certain segment of the population. And it touches people also in a different way and it touches on values and it. I just think it has, it has this opportunity to offer a deeper reflection and more an intuitive sense of what's wrong of opening up exploration and not pointing to, you know, detailed specific solutions but more encouraging people to be part of that conversation. But of course, you know, everyone on this call there's so many great artists here I'm sure that I'd love to hear what other people have to say about that. I'm sure there's better solutions. I can see that I am. I'm in a Jesus life at the moment because the sun just came out out of my window. Yes. One thing I wanted to add to what you just said is, I think, not probably a whole lot of people are not aware that there is actually alternatives to thinking about the economy because the powers that be are very happy for us to believe that, you know, capitalism is the and that's all we can do and it's never going to change. So, you know, just probably just presenting just mentioning the fact that there are alternatives that there are people who are thinking about them and even trying to implement them is something very useful. Yeah, for sure. I see that Becky Miller just put a comment in here that absence of females in economics and it's a huge problem. Absence of females of people of color. You know, economists in Africa or South America or elsewhere in the world really have don't tend to have the influence that economists out of, you know, five universities in the US and UK have is appalling. And so the discipline has looked at a narrow set of problems and has looked at it in a very specific way. This ties into, I think the conversation we had before that was about systemic racism and how do you change the whole system to make room for people to access to leadership, right. So the fact that there aren't no pathways maybe for women and people of color to be able to access to leadership roles in the really related to the economy is itself a problem. Yeah, for sure it is. The situation in ecological economics is definitely much better, I think because it has attracted people who are a lot of ecological economists come at it because they're working on a specific ecological issue with the community or in a region. And that often is their, their entry entry point into into the discipline. But so here's my story when I wanted to study ecological economics I first tried to do a masters. The economics department at the University of Victoria did everything they could to keep me out of the university because they didn't want me studying ecological economics. Then I tried to do it at the University of British Columbia I had to do it outside of the economics department because the economics department still doesn't recognize the existence of ecological economics. That's terrible. Okay, here's another question for non economists who is armed with Google search. What are we looking for when looking for alternatives to capitalism. That's, that's, I mean, in Canada, there's lots of good work by done by the Canadian Center for policy alternatives. I don't know if you, you know, then they, they write a lot on economic issues. And they have really great analysis on how how we can structure things for a more equitable economy. So, sometimes the code word progressive economics is used to, to find these kind of things. But you know, even it's hard for, for people to publish when they're producing outside of that that mainstream. You know, like the World Bank doesn't tend to do articles by them. And one thing people can also look up is donut economics right Kate Kate herself the economist who came up with the theory has a website and there's a lot of good resources on that. Yeah, and she's got a book donut economics seven ways to to think as a 21st century economist and and her it's I see someone just mentioned her Ted talk she's got a fabulous Ted talk so I really recommend that. And she's a really dynamic speaker and has brought a lot of insight, and has really been influential in even at fairly high, you know, level institutions. Okay, we have questions from the live stream. Two questions what organizations can I support that will be the most impactful towards making active change. And where does hydroelectricity fit in the conversation. Yeah, for the first, if you go to the Canadian action network. Sorry climate action network, or has your action climate. That has a listing of all the environmental groups that are working together across Canada on climate change issues. And the big ones like David Suzuki Foundation and Environmental Defense Canada, Pemina Institute, a kid is in Quebec a really good one. And so those those are, you know, great groups that are out there. Second question about hydroelectricity where does it fit in. You know, we do have this history of building large hydro dams in Canada and they were done. Unfortunately, in a way that definitely most of them did not respect indigenous rights. Often it caused well loss of access to traditional territories it caused mercury poisoning. And so on. But now that those dams and hydroelectric facilities exist. And I wouldn't advocate for building more new big dams. Certainly they would have to go into a certain a lot of scrutiny and a very high bar for any more to be to go forward I would think. But now that they're there. One great thing they do offer us is that we can use them as giant batteries and so we can put solar panels and use solar panels to generate electricity but when the sun goes down or same with wind turbines when it's not. When there's no wind, we can use the water in those dams to generate electricity so that we have water in our electricity during the lower periods so it's kind of very fortunate that way it's unfortunate how we got there but it is something that will be useful as we try and get rid of fossil fuels. I think we have time for one last one. We're stuck in a loop where our publications aren't diverse both in types of system and the people being published, and that feeds back into making it seem making it seem like capitalism is only is our only option. I mean, I think we're, we are beyond that point in that, like in academia we still do have that problem in that there are small number of publications that tend to control the field. So much interesting economics research is being done outside of the economics department, like the economics department is the last place you go on a university campus to look for relevant research in on most campuses that's relevant to biodiversity laws climate change inequality. In your geography department your sociology department other places like that there's there's good economics being done that's more holistic. And then outside of academia you know we have so many great publications right now that are asking these bigger questions about what the economy is for it. I think the pandemic has showed us like the neoliberal vision of the future of this fantastic interconnected world. We're now seeing the downsides to it which are, you know, the fact that a pandemic could travel so quickly across the world because of this highly integrated global system trade and so on. We're in a really, really good time for asking questions and the Black Life Matters movement is also asking really good questions because economics is also ignoring the whole history of how wealth was seized seized from Indigenous peoples, how people built up fortunes on the back of slaves, and, and that is just, you know, swept under the market and we just talk about supply and demand curves which is really quite crazy. But so outside of the economics establishment, there are such great conversations going on like we're having today. And so I really thank you, Chateau and Sarah and for setting this up and giving space to this and also to interact with artists because that's not where I usually get a chance to talk about these important issues. Thank you, Tom. And Sarah, if you're here and want to come back maybe for a last goodbye. Oh, here you are. Hello, that was fantastic, Tom. Thank you so much. To finish, I wanted to say, I have a quote in my head and I have no idea it is terrible because I can't cite where it comes from but there's something that I always remember is somebody at some point some very brilliant person said, it's very hard to change the system within the system and it's much easier to build a different system and then to bring people to it, which I think speaks a little bit to what you're saying about like within the academia, you know, there's a lot of resistance but if everybody else around like starts to imagine how different it could be then maybe we can build a different system. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who is who has stayed with us who has been watching both in this zoom call and on the live stream. We have one more panel tonight at nine o'clock Eastern time which will be a conversation about the future between Donna Michelle St. Bernard and Jordan Tannehill. And then after that, we hope you'll join us for a dance party. So, you know, dance like the earth is watching, DJed by Cyrus Marcus Ware at 10pm Eastern time. And if I could just say that just in between, there's more at 730. And then we have field notes from the future, Alana Mitchell, who created CSIC is launching a new show at Folda so you can see it live on the folder website at 730. And then you can still come back and hear some more conversations and then we're all going to need to dance so thank you again Tom so much for this wonderful conversation to all of you for being here. And we will see you all back tonight. Right. Yes. Bye everyone.