 My name is Rob Badger. I'm a conservation photographer. My sweetie, Nita and I are working on a project called Beauty and the Beast, Wildflowers and Climate Change. And what we're trying to do is what you're talking about here. I've been photographing environmental problems, environmental disasters since 1980. It started with the Inyo Valley when LA was trying to pump more water out of the Owens Valley to supply the growing needs of LA. I've photographed mining disasters, oil spills, and I just got to the emotional overload point again where I can't do this anymore. I would be so angry, I'd cry. So I kind of just stumbled on wildflowers and found out that virtually everyone loves flowers. So if we get people's attention and try to engage them in something they already love, get their attention and then get them to read an essay in our book about what climate change is doing, what population is doing, the history of public lands, how as a country we believe we own these public lands. So it's about getting people to recognize something they love because what we love we protect, what we value we love and what we love we protect. What you're saying is so important. How do we engage people in a poetic, almost romantic, spiritual way to get their attention and then act to do something? So a question I've got. I don't know how many people know the difference between the protected status between a national park, a national monument, national forest, and BLM land. Because in a national park everything's sacred, in national monuments you can mine, BLM land, I mean all these things. So it may be important for people to know how the protection is related to these different government entities. So I love what you're doing. I'm so grateful. Thank you. We have an essay about citizen scientists in our book. Oh and one more thing. We are looking for authors of color. Not white people. I'm sorry we already have the quote fulfilled. But to write in our books we have a collection of different essays we want to reach as broad in our audience as possible so anyone can talk to us later about what we're doing and why we need these authors. Thank you. I just want to say one thing about to complete something that Mary Ellen said about monuments and Zinke's survey is now finished. And what I'm seeing now is what I think are like trial balloons because he has described what the three he wants to work on. He's picked three. One is Bears Ears which just happened. I spent the last couple of years going down to Colorado with Navajos, Hopi, Zuni and I know how much the Colorado River know how much they care about this. Bears Ears they just got it after all this effort. He's going to plug Escalade the staircase. He's going to get a big beautiful one that Clinton put in and he's talking about one in Oregon. But I think that doesn't seem so bad given all the monuments we have but I think they're like trial balloons and I think if he succeeds on any one of those. It's a terrible precedent because national monument you're talking about the different distinctions is slightly ambiguous. It doesn't have the strong organic act protection that a national park does. So it's very important not to start losing these monuments and to really resist. Join the tribes because they're going to come out against Bears Ears and Escalade. The tribes are getting stronger even before Standing Rock. The tribes are really getting together in a way they never did. The spale faces were always good at making divisions among them. We divided and conquered and it's finally and that went all through the last century. Indians were sniping each other like environmentalists. They're always faulting the people with slightly different persuasion and environmental movement. So that's important. Other questions? Woman with the glasses. So I was wondering if either one of you have anything to say about two issues. Population and pros and cons of technology. Well you know I will say pop I have lunch with Paul Ehrlich. Do you know who he is? I have lunch with Paul Ehrlich about every six weeks or so. And I met him first about four years ago when I was researching this book because I chose like six basic you know mechanisms of nature that are really kind of pinch points where extinction is happening and he's a population biologist who became very famous in the 70s for writing the population bomb. But he also was really famous as a scientist for quantifying co-evolution which is the way that plants, species co-evolve traits in tandem with other species. So the example that he used was butterflies and plants that co-evolve traits together. The reason a butterfly is the way it is is because of the host plant that it co-evolved with. So I'm asking him to explain to me you know co-evolution and how did you uncover this and he very sweetly says I will tell you about co-evolution because you must promise me that when you write about it you will say that the real problem is overpopulation of humans and overconsumption of resources and it's true. So I've asked myself all the time like what the hell is wrong with us? Like why are we proliferating so much? This is bad. It doesn't seem adaptive. Like certainly there are examples in nature where you will have a boom in population, a population boom that then leads to a bust because the boom like they overeat their habitat and then the population busts. So we think we're so smart right? We think we're so smart and so but we're doing that. And I interviewed Richard Dawkins. Do you all know who he is? I interviewed him a few weeks ago and he said something that has really struck with me. I've been thinking about it. Which is that we are perfectly evolved for the past. So he said all of us are the result of a successful sexual reproductive act. Right? But that is unusual like going back 100,000 years most of what would be homo sapiens or were homo sapiens did not live long enough to complete a successful reproductive act. So we're still kind of behaving as though we were 100,000 years ago with this instinct for increasing ourselves. And so we're not adapted for the present or for the future. We're adapted for the past. This is a problem. So this is a huge problem because the way we're going to learn is going to be so ugly. And this is what I'm trying to like let's not learn it that ugly way. Let's learn it the better way, which is anticipate that this is going to happen and change our behavior before millions of people die or millions of people starve or things get even uglier than they are for many people. So technology is so complicated, right? Technology is tool making. It's tool making. A compass is technology. We are driven by our technology. We invent these tools that then change the way that we live. There's immense capacity for technology to do a lot of really good things for conservation. Like there's now a way to do gene manipulation. So for example, you could manipulate the genes of an invasive species and keep it from reproducing so that you could stop an invasive species from ruining an ecosystem without pouring any poison on anybody. So there's all kinds of things that technology can help us do. But technology is tools. It's not a plan. And it's not a comprehension of a problem. I also think that people always forget that there are trade-offs with every technology. I mean you can do that with invasive species, but who knows what the downstream consequences will be. And that goes back to I think what you both were talking about earlier, which is this kind of hubris and arrogance that we can figure it out and anticipate all of the feedback loops in this incredibly complicated system that we call Planet Earth. I actually think your two questions are sort of connected in the sense that I think we've lost ground in our understanding in the society of those two things. In the 60s, in the environmental movement, it was a truism that if we do not solve this population problem, all these other things we're doing, preservation of landscape, clean air, clean water, it's all gone. This is the problem we absolutely, the underlying problem we have to solve. I think people were, especially in the environmental community, were much more aware of that than they are now. And I think the same is true of technology. I disagree with Marianne a little bit on technological fix. I think we believed we had come to persuade people that there's not going to be a technological fix. It's a pie in the sky and it's almost a dangerous illusion that we're going to get out of this by technology, because technology got us in this. And all these suggestions, an awful lot of them are not very good suggestions of how to get out of it. So I think there's a new belief in the technological fix. And I think it has something to do with how wonderful these stories are in this new generation. All these wonderful things we have with these phones that do these amazing things, why not believe that we can solve our problems technologically? It's because they're much more complicated than a cell phone, you know, the problems that are facing us. And I think the disturbing thing to be about the movement is the movement on population especially has, the movement knows this is true, but is afraid to talk about it. They're afraid to be called races. And because the movement now has gotten very belt way and very sort of wonkish, they want to make alliances. This is what the Sierra Club did. It doesn't talk population anymore. My dad published a population bomb, Erlich's population bomb back in the 68. Since then, the world population has doubled. That's an extraordinary figure. That's crazy. In my lifetime it's tripled. There are people, Marxists, who tell you, well, it's just a distribution problem. They're totally crazy. It's an absolute numbers problem. In my lifetime, 72 years, it's tripled. How can, nothing like that's ever happened before. So we've got to talk about it again. We can't be afraid of making our immigrant advocates mad at us because it's too important. We can't be bullied out of talking about something that's very important. Okay, one more question. Gentleman in the back. I was saying divide and conquer. And Mr. Vrower brought it up earlier about trying to get people, bring people into the movement. And what I see happening in America versus what's happening, what happened in Northern Europe where they pay, they have a tax base that takes care of their everyday problems with people such as education, shelter, childcare, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas here, we have such a divided country that is hard to get involved. I mean, people can't even be here tonight. You see who's here is probably people like me that are tired or, but people cannot get involved in a movement when they have so many fragments going on in their life that they can't handle even those. So that's what we need to do, I think. And I want you to comment on that. What I'm saying now, whether I'm all crazy or is this right? Do you agree with me? Well, no, I think we don't know how to grapple with the different scales of different problems that we have. You're right. I mean, and I think that the way people are living in their homes tonight, it's 7.15. So let's say in California, people are having dinner if they're lucky. And yet even very affluent people feel a sense of urgency of survival. And we do have a kind of culture where you have to kind of constantly be doing better in order to stay in place. So it creates a sense of being under the gun all the time and not really having margins for anything bigger. I always say, I want people to tell upper middle class white moms and dads that if their kids did citizen science, it would get them into Harvard. Because then they would all do it. They're all running around the state of California all the time with their kids on soccer teams. What are they doing that for? They're not going to play professional soccer, and yet they're devoting their entire lives to playing soccer. So it's like this competitive advantage everybody's always looking for. Let's make saving the environment your competitive advantage. But here's again why citizen science is so cool because it is a template for actually putting different dimensions of scale into the same picture. So wherever you're at, there's a way to conceptualize it and then communicate it. And it is technology that makes it possible. But citizen science existed long before technology. It's about direct observation. It's about you personally observing, making observations, and very importantly making note of your observations. So that's where my hope is that we really do have the capacity that this even the very, very cutting edge technology, if that citizen science is its big data science, actually has these very ancient roots in indigenous cultural traditional ecological knowledge. And that we are finding a way to reintegrate some of the better ways we have of approaching an integrated life. But we have all these people, we have all these countries, we have all these nationalities. It's a lot to integrate. It's a lot to put together. One more question. What I'm listening to as a creative writers is developing the style of the emotional existentialism. Fair enough. That issue. In fact, that's how we become knowing human beings. Because we know what will make us go on living and what will stop our existence. That's the three elements. First, we freeze, we observe to see if we're going to have to fight or if we're going to have to flee to live another day. Out of that, confronting this coming mass death, possible extinction of humanity. This is all on the table now. I just cut to the greater issue. I think we have to conquer, we have to defeat poverty, world poverty. That's the basic issue. Defeat poverty. Control corruption. Corruption is always going to be with us. And abolish war. Actually carrying weapons and killing another person, othering another, making them enemy. Those are three big conditions, but that's the only way that I see that we're going to save the world. Or keep the climate that we have of breathing. Otherwise, we will be like the Berlin population in World War II, at the end of the war. Bomb. And women, children, wounded soldiers facing an onslaught of the Russian army, Tommy Gunn Brigade, coming in undefended. What could they do? They stayed in place and they just took it. Those that divide, those that women were raped and so on, they just took it because they wanted to live another day. And they recreated their society and their city. Is there a question? The question is, can we accept the moral condition that we have greed, anger and ignorance? You've spoken to the ignorance, that we're trying to curb the ignorance of showing the people that it goes beyond their day to day existence. You raise many issues which are all really valid and interesting and relevant. In certain conservation biology worlds, the general view about what's happening is that it has seemed kind of as inevitable, and I don't know if it is or not, that we're going to be putting like 2 billion more people on the earth by about 2040. And part of why that is is because of countries that are impoverished, have people who have 10, 12 children as a way of hedging because that's how they've done it. Again, to Richard Dawkins' point, they're adapted to the past, not to the present. And that it will take at least a generation for those countries, the peoples that do that, to understand that actually now they have a chance for their children to live. So if they have only two or three children, those children will live. So there's no need to have the 10 children, the 15 children. So that's like a lag. So in certain conservation communities they're looking at like, okay, so there's this lag that's going to happen. And the point is we have to get species through that pinch point because people will be converting habitat to feed all those people. We will have excess people before population levels off. So population is actually leveling off in the United States as we have a more affluent and healthier population that knows if you have two children it's likely they will live. So you don't need to have more. So that's one model. I tend to not want to believe that it's a Fed accompli that we have to add those two billion on. I hope that we don't do that. But in a lot of the things, you know, I think it is really to Richard Dawkins' point that we are adapted to the past. That's warfare, rape, you know, scarcity of resources. These are conditions of the past that we do not have to have today. So we have to quickly get adapt to the conditions we really do have, which is that if we distribute what we have more evenly to the poverty issue, there's enough for everybody. This presumes that humans can collectively act rationally. Oh, it's true. There's not a whole lot of evidence. There's no evidence at all. When you ask me, I would say when you say we're going to ban war, we're going to ban poverty, my guess is that both those things are going to be with us forever. It's a horrible thing to say. On population, and I'm about to contradict what I just said, but my dad used to say on population, you cannot continue to make predictions there will be two billion more because this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And people don't quite understand that. They say, well, we're just being practical. You cannot continue to make prophecies like that because they will happen because people start to build for that. So anyway, yeah. Okay. On that note, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you all for coming and thank you San Francisco Library for hosting this. Thank you, Susan.