 Chris, I'm going to mute and I'm going to ask you to mute up as well. We are live on video now on YouTube, so. Yeah, I was on mute, now I'm going to mute again. Perfect. To reflect upon the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, my name is Peter Schlosser, Vice President and Vice Provost of Global Futures at ASU. I'm a faculty member in the School of Sustainability, Earth and Space Exploration and Sustainable Engineering and the Build Environment, and I'm directing Global Futures Laboratory and the Julian Ripley Global Institute of Sustainability. The Global Futures Laboratory has been established by ASU to further enhance our studies in sustainability in the future of our planet. My name is Francis, our service to the global community. If you can find more information on all our activities, please use the Global Futures Laboratory web page. The symposium consists of three parts. I will give a few introductory remarks. This will be followed by a conversation with four of my ASU colleagues. And then we will share them and enhance our studies in sustainability. Two remarks by ASU President Professor Michael Grohl. Francis, our service. Let me start with the introductory remarks. I can find more information. On this 50th Earth Day, we hold this symposium to discuss and examine the current state of our planet, which progress we have made since the first Earth Day was held in 1970 and which challenges we are facing moving forward, especially in the view of the present deep shock of the coronavirus outbreak and how this pandemic has forced the world and its residents to not simply respond to the current moment, but prepare for future scenarios. Earth Day was established by Senator Gaylord Nelson as a response to witnessing the damage that was caused by an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara. Since this first Earth Day, much has been accomplished in terms of addressing critical problems facing humankind and the planet as a whole, but also much is left to be done as signified by the fact that at this moment, we find our world in a massive crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic forces global society and governments to respond to a variety of consequences unlike those from any other global events since Earth Day was first celebrated in April 1970. Planetary systems are undergoing the ultimate stress test, as we are speaking. We are experiencing capacity constraints at social and economic levels caused by the reaction of our planet to the multiple pressures it is experiencing more strongly than ever before. Of course, other major crises have occurred over the past 50 years since the first Earth Day was held, but typically they have been regional and did not require the same global response that this current pandemic has necessitated. To name just a few examples, going backwards in time, more or less in sequence, not that long ago in 2019, towards the end of 2019, we had the Australian wildfire, which was an inferno that we hadn't seen before. We had environmentally-driven conflict and refugee crises. We had air pollution events at a massive amount like smoke. We had acid rain. We had military conflicts, hunger crisis, terrorist attacks. But all of these could be mastered in a more regional context. And the present situation reminds us that we are highly interconnected, globally interconnected, that there are certain events that can actually shock the entire system and do it on a very rapid timescale. There are, of course, many problems that are moving forward at a slower pace, but ultimately they will have the same severe impacts on our planet. They include examples such as climate change, water shortages, food security or public health. We cannot forget these problems as we are dealing with the present crisis. And they need our full attention. And we only can hope that the present crisis heightens our awareness of these problems and accelerates our response to them once we are through the present situation of shock. We are now moving to part two of the symposium, which is a conversation about Earth Day among four of ASU's distinguished scientists in the field of sustainability. I would like to welcome my colleagues, Nina Berman, Chris Boone, Manfred Laubichler and Kathleen Merrigan. I will ask them to briefly introduce themselves as they appear on my screen. And the first to come up is, in the upper left on my screen, Manfred Laubichler. Which is a conversation about Earth Day. Hello. This is Manfred Laubichler. I'm a professor in the School of Life Sciences at ASU and the Santa Fe Institute. I'm an evolutionary biologist and complex systems researcher. My experience with Earth Day started very early when my parents dragged me to all kinds of environmental events. So I'm very glad to participate at that 50-year anniversary. Hello. This is Manfred Laubichler. I also, my main research areas is basically the focus of, focusing on understanding complex systems, their history, their present and their future, especially the focus on how something new can emerge in evolution and history. So I'm very glad to participate at that 50-year anniversary. Hello. This is Manfred Laubichler. I think there was a little gap in terms of building. So next on my screen is Kathleen. Hey there. I'm Kathleen Merrigan. I'm a professor and I run an entity called the Sweetie Center for Sustainable Food Systems. So you'll be hearing from me all about food. Happy Earth Day to everyone. It's a challenging time. I'm hoping you're staying safe and smart. As a couple of my colleagues wrote earlier today, hindsight is a great thing, but foresight is even better. And that's what I hope we address here on the panel today. Thank you, Kathleen. Next is Nina. Yeah. Hello. I'm Nina Berman. I'm the director of the School of International Letters and Cultures. And I would like us today to also think about globalization. To keep Earth Day global, looking at global dimensions of it, and also consider the historical perspectives. Thank you, Nina. And we will finish the introductions with Chris. Hello, everyone. My name is Chris Boone. I'm the dean of the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. And what gets me out of bed primarily in the morning is making sure that we are educating the next generation of leaders who will be prepared to take on crises like we're seeing now, so that they can anticipate them rather than reacting to them. Thank you, Chris. So then let's begin the conversation. So why and how was the establishment and recognition of an Earth Day in 1970 such a land mage went? And how has it, its intent stood the test of time over the past 50 years? Maybe Chris can start to answer this question or to respond to it. Sure. I'd be happy to begin. So of course, we're celebrating the 50th anniversary this year, which is an extraordinary landmark. And what's more important is that we need to continue to celebrate Earth Day because the job's not over. We still have plenty of things to do. Some things have gotten better, air quality in some places, toxic releases have gotten better in some places, but certainly worse in others. We're dealing with issues around climate change that 50 years ago very few people were thinking about. So when we're thinking about the things that we need to manage on a planetary scale, it requires the kind of collaboration that we're seeing now or would like to see even more of with the COVID pandemic. We're on this island Earth and there's no other place to go. And so if we're really going to manage it, the CO2 that I release here has an impact of everything that happens across the entire planet. So we need to manage on a planetary scale if we're going to solve local issues and solve local problems. So Earth Day to Nina's point has to be global in perspective. It has to engage and galvanize at the local level with the understanding that unless we start thinking on planetary scales, which is what Earth Day asks us to do, then we're not going to be able to build and deliver the kind of future that we want and need. And maybe Nina has some perspective on this one too. Thank you. Yes. So the establishment of Earth Day was indeed a landmark event. However, if we want to acknowledge Earth Day as truly global, we need to consider the diverse histories that led to the establishment of this event and how Earth Day also means different things to different people. So in the US and European context, Earth Day builds on cultural, social and political movements that go back to the early 19th century. Nature was discovered and became a discrete topic once industrialization and modernization began to visibly change the environment. In the United States, this notion of a return to nature was fueled by groups representing the larger social and political spectrum from Thoreau's Walden to cowboys and ranchers and the conservationist legislation of Theodore Roosevelt that created the national parks in 1906 already. And for the inauguration of Earth Day, the immediate political context of the 1960s was clear but if we think of indigenous groups in the United States, Earth Day becomes an entirely different story, one that reminds of the loss of Earth of dispossession but also resilience and renewal. Relevant European traditions include the Romanticists but also figures like Sebastian Knipp, Hikers movements, nudists, the anthroposophical movement, and even the national socialist obsession with the outdoors and the natural. So many routes lead to Earth Day. And outside the Euro-American space, the situation is different again. Clearly, activists and movements exist across the planet. But we need to consider the power differentials and distinct histories. People in the global South and the world's indigenous populations are facing the fallout of developments that were not initiated by them. So what does Earth Day mean in those contexts? So to make Earth Day truly global, we have to consider what made Earth Day necessary. How we can ensure that it is not mainly an event embraced by white middle-class folks and how we can form alliances beyond the international agreements that clearly do not go far enough. Thank you, Nina. So we often talk about this moment in time as a stress test for the ecosystem. Sometimes we say it's the ultimate stress test because it cuts across all the sectors. What do we actually mean when we say stress test and what can we learn from that? Maybe Kathleen can start to lead us into this discussion. Sure. Thank you, Peter. As I've already warned people, I'm going to be focused on food because that's my jam. So as we've seen with agriculture expanding and humans expanding into our wild ecosystems, there have been consequences. And there was a really interesting article I read last year in Nature Sustainability that said 25% of infectious diseases since 1940, the drivers were agricultural. And so we're in this current pandemic and we're all very stressed. And there's no connection to COVID-19 to any kind of industrialized livestock system. I've seen some of that stuff on the Internet. I don't see there's any direct connection. But it has elevated the discussion about the importance of how we produce our food and the importance of looking at it in a systems way, understanding all the interdependencies and connections. And in the pandemic, we're in the middle of a really incredible stress test. As you said, Peter, and I was thinking, well, what do we have that's the dominant system, at least in the US? We have these just-in-time supply chains that are delivering from very concentrated large-scale operations and oftentimes dependent on very vulnerable, poorly compensated workers. So I think we have a system that is stressed because there's so many vulnerabilities. And I was watching one of Governor Cuomo's daily addresses about the pandemic. And he put up this slide at the end on Friday, and it was hashtag reimagined. And he said, we have to reimagine this society that we're in and make something of this pandemic, make some lemonade out of lemons. And so I'm not surprised that the food system is stressed. But let me just give you some examples of people aren't watching this on a daily basis. I know that we're seeing empty shells in the groceries. Let me give you a few bullet points as to why that's happening. We have had massive closures of meat packing plants in this country. 11 now, a couple of big processed food plants. California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota. One JBS plant in Minnesota, for example, slaughters 20,000 hogs a day. So without those plants open, there's this whole backlog in the meat industry that's a crisis. We have important export markets upset. The national corn growers just came out with a study. We export a lot of our corn. The farmers are going to get about $50 less an acre this year is the expectation right now. We have distribution challenges. I was with my students in Washington, D.C. in March. And one of the interesting things, things are just unfolding. Things are closing around us. We're going to go on our tour of the Capitol and, you know, within an hour before our tour, those were cut off. So we're in the midst of everything happening. And one of the things I heard from USDA was that there was this real bottleneck in shipping containers because they were coming back from China in the timely manner that they had normally done. So shipping containers, truckers, we were sort of short on truckers before all this. But now we're having a hard time trucking and there's allowances needed for heavier trucks and longer trucking hours, air flights that come in with fresh berries, for example, in the holds, they're not coming in. We have very separated supply chains. So one of the reasons why you're reading about people who may be dumping milk in Arizona are dairy producers are faced with dumping 125,000 gallons of milk a day because their markets dried up. Those markets that were going to schools and food service like Sodexo to restaurants, they're separate supply chains from the grocery supply chains. And it's just rigid and it's really hard to pivot. So we're seeing dumping of milk, dumping of eggs, plowing under produce. We also see a system that's dependent on farm workers. In many cases, especially in Arizona, where we live, some of those workers are coming across the border daily. And the president has just put out an executive order. He's about to put out an executive order about stopping immigration for the next 60 days. We believe farm workers are exempt from that. But just think we have a lot of people who are working in very tight elbow to elbow jobs in both meat packing plants and in our fields, not always with very good housing situations and in some cases crossing the border every day. And then there are other vulnerable populations that we're seeing stress in this around the food system. I will wrap up here, Peter. I know I'm a college professor and you know what we're like. We can talk for three hours straight without taking a breath. But I will say that restaurant workers are really vulnerable. A lot of them live what they call tip to mouth. There are a lot of people who are getting that $2.13 an hour wage and then they have tips on top of it. And that's fine if you're at some fancy white cloth restaurant, but the vast majority are not. And so we're seeing these folk with no margin, no financial margin in their lives. And Nina mentioned the Native American communities, Navajo Nation, which in part is in Arizona, not entirely, it's a very big tribal nation. But if they were counted as a state and we see those stats on MSNBC and CNN and they say, which states are the hardest hit on a per capita basis? Navajo would be right behind New York and New Jersey. And their food system is incredibly stressed. So I could go on and on. I think there are a lot of solutions to these problems. That's what I want people to know. And I think we've known about these fragile parts of our food system for a long time. So I will take a break from that, but I don't want to be Debbie Downer. But what we're seeing right now is that our food system is not up to the stress test. And when I look to the future and I think about climate change and the increasing pressures, that's putting on our productive capacity. I know things have to change. Thanks, Kathleen. And we will get to solutions as we move through the course of this symposium. So Manfred, you are studying evolution. What is your take on the complexity of them and in the nature of their presence stress test? Kathleen gave us a lot of evidence of what the stress test means in real time for real people. What I want to do is talk about the reasons why we have this and what that stress test actually means and why it might potentially be a very good thing that we are facing it right now. Because if there wouldn't have been COVID-19, we would have a 50-year anniversary celebration of Earth Day. Everybody would have been very happy about what has been accomplished. A movement growing from a small origin to a global movement, celebrations around the globe. Yet nothing really has happened on a very substantial level as we see now because of the COVID crisis. And so we see those interdependent systems. They have been increased in their interdependence on an ever accelerating rate. Why? What drives those systems? Because we need to understand how we got there in order to change it. And that is the purpose of stress tests. They became popular after the financial crisis where central banks then started to look at different types of banks under certain scenarios in order to test whether they would fail or not. Now we can say, since COVID-19 came, pretty much every system we have on this planet failed. Why? We have removed consciously or unconsciously many of the regulatory feedbacks that govern complex systems. So imagine a complex system has basically two types of regulations. They are the ones that make it grow, like the cells in our body. And they are ones that basically stop growth and regulate it to a certain desirable outcome. Our globalized capitalist economy has removed all local regulations in the interest of permanent growth. That was an ideology that has driven our economies and also the way we structure our societies for at least the last 50 years. So the outcome that once then things begin to break down and sort of Kathleen's example are wonderful. You start with one tiny little bit. For instance, farm workers can no longer cross a border. What follows from that? It's a ripple effect of consequences across the system. And that's what we are seeing. And that's why we can say, given that there was one particular stress, a new virus that spread very quickly because of exactly the kind of patterns of globalization that we have. Strictly speaking, as a biologist, the virus is not even that bad compared to what it could be. But it is enough to basically tip over all of those complex interdependent systems. So now what we are doing right now is we're trying to contain the virus. And what you see happening is that the build up borders and boundaries everywhere. Quarantine, no travel across the European Union where we have the freedom of travel. Now those that freedom of travel is stopped. We have national boundaries again. It's a short gap solution to put in regulatory structures, very crude ones, in order to stop the virus. So going beyond that, sort of the post vaccine word, what we have to consciously do is redesign our systems to the right kind of balance between what you would call regulatory feedback or negative feedback and the implicit growth dynamics that we have. So that's the lesson from complex systems here. Thank you, Manfred. So as we are seeing in real time, many of our economic societal systems are being under stress and partially or totally breaking down. What are we learning for moving forward? Because it's clear that this is not the last epidemic. We had seen others before. You can go back to the Black Death or beyond that. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that we will not see similar or possibly worse ones coming as we are moving forward in time. So what are we learning as we are going through this moment of hardship and restrictions about being better prepared for the future? Maybe Nina, you can take that to start us off with. Well, thinking about what Manfred just said about how the system was breaking down on all these different levels and different sectors. So I think coordination and solidarity across the planet can only emerge if there is a shared understanding for the urgency of the moment, but also for the root causes of the overall situation. So I think we often jump too quickly to solutions and I think we need more analysis and also consensus in terms of understanding the situation. So we can't just innovate ourselves out of the mess that we're in via technology. I think there are so many levels that need to be considered and that's where we need more discussion, analysis and also consensus. So I mean, we've moved from the save the planet to ensuring that the planet remains habitable in the last few years only. That is a very new understanding of the situation. It's a major shift and a lot of folks still don't understand it. But we also, and again here, location is crucial. We also have to understand that two thirds of the world's population have been constantly told that they should develop and modernize and emulate Western society and then suddenly the message has shifted. So the the overdeveloped societies to use a term Paul Gilroy has coined the overdeveloped societies of the global North have to embrace their responsibility for the current situation. I'm not saying that it's only the global North, but clearly there are a number of developments that have to be acknowledged as being connected with the way modernization and industrialization and development has occurred and then been sort of imposed on the rest of the planet. So it is crucial, in my opinion, to move away from a narrative of progress tied to profit to a narrative of sustainability that is tied to social justice. So to shift our discourse from modernization and development to ecologization. And one quick follow up on what you said. You said, you know, we cannot rush too much. We have to take time to understand better. How does that go with emergency response or what is the transition from emergency response where we don't have that time to think to the time when we get out of this state of emergency response to having possibly the time to really think that's true. How do you, how do you see that? Well, I think that is clearly the big challenge right now. But I do think we see from the response to COVID-19 that this Russian into, you know, all kinds of guidelines and so forth without a deeper analysis, without complex thinking, right, and connecting the dots that that is a problem. So I think we need to learn from the current moment and try to anticipate situations where we're learning from from our failures right now to have a more global approach, but also, and that has to be grounded, though, in analysis that connects the dots and is more holistic. And Mentred, what is your take on that you already touched upon that in your last response, but especially this question of urgency versus, you know, strategic planning, where do you see the balance there and the crunch? Well, I mean, I choose to be an optimist here and say actually the COVID crisis came at exactly the right moment. Because the problem was that we knew that we need to retool many of our deep structural features in the economy, in the way science and technology intersects with society. What kind of global institutions do we really need and all of that? And we got stuck because we were what we evolutionary biologists called we were on a particular fit, optimum fitness peak, and we couldn't get over it to another peak. So what we now have we have a crisis that enables us to do a frame shift. We can completely rethink and redesign where we need to go in order to address the next couple of challenges that we have to have here. So in that sense, it's a great crisis is an opportunity to actually retool in a substantial way. The problem is the time frame that we have to operate on. So now we are in a crisis mode where certain decisions are being made, and we are experiencing a system that is far away from equilibrium. And the problem is that all of our science generally describe systems near equilibrium. So to pick on our colleagues from economics, the biggest problem that we have with them is that it works 95% of the time in boring systems, and it completely fades in the period of crisis. But what's happening right now and that's so exciting here is that all of a sudden, the constraints and the rules of the game are no longer applicable. So societies can mobilize trillions of dollars within two weeks. This means that there is a huge capacity to redirect future investments into the kind of investments that we actually need to develop or redesign a system that is resilient and robust vis-a-vis the future challenges. And that is, I think, the importance of where scientists and need to get into the game and not on our usual timeframe of studying something for 10 years, because then we lost the opportunity. So we need to get into the game right now with what we know, which is incomplete, but better than nothing. Thanks, Manfred. And picking up on that point of crisis versus opportunity, or saying, in spite of the crisis that we are in, let's see the positive side that we might possibly for conclusions that we could draw from that, that would help us structure and design our future. How much consensus do you think can be reached around that? Because if you look at society as a whole, there are probably quite a few people who have a hard time to see the opportunity, who are really immersed and hard hit by the crisis to the point where their existence is really threatened. So how long are we navigating that sort of treacherous ground? Chris, do you want to? Yeah, I'd be happy to. I want to remind everybody that the original Earth Day, Senator Nelson tapped into the enthusiasm and growing student movement of the 1960s. And I think that's what we need to do again today is tap into the energy and power that I see every day, or used to see every day on campus, but still see virtually through Zoom of students who are thinking about their own personal futures, but also thinking about their next six or seven decades on the planet, and not just about themselves, but deeply about others as well. So in some ways we need to just get out of the way, right? We need to find ways to not be an impediment to what I see as almost unbounded energy of our students to think about things in different ways. And what we're trying to do here in the School of Sustainability is to do some of the things that Montfrey talked about earlier. We want our students to think in systems there, in systems terms. So think about unintended consequences, even when you're planning out things that seem to be very well intentioned to take it to all possible conclusions to make sure that what we're prescribing is worse than doing nothing at all. And then also getting our students to think about building the future that they want, not necessarily trying to predict because we know that predictions often fail miserably. But how can we anticipate possible plausible futures and then use that system thinking, use the tools of complex adaptive systems, use our notion idea of what the world should be, and get our students who will be our future leaders, hopefully in 100 years time when the next pandemic hits, they'll be much, much better prepared than we have them with the current crisis. Thanks, Chris. Kathleen, Chris brings in the youth, the next generations. And of course a lot of what we have to think about is what kind of planet are we leaving for the next generations. And they in essence, recognize that as signified by Fridays for Future, climate movements, they actually demand of us to reshape our thinking about how to move in the future and then how to shape it. Do you think that this moment, bad as it is, can actually amplify the impact of the youth movement and give them more leverage, more power in a way? I absolutely do and I totally agree with what Chris is sharing. You know, young people in my world, they're more interested in food than our generation. Millennials on down younger, they're really interested in where their food comes from, who produced it, how it was produced. They're really interested in a relocalization of our food systems. And we'll see how many of these smaller localized operations survive the current pandemic and I hope some of the aid that comes to Washington gets to some of the smaller entities as it should. But I think that we're going to go and we're out of this crisis and we're going to have really interesting case studies about how these local food systems were actually the more resilient. And I think that young people are going to embrace that learning and they're going to try to reshape our food society and I'm excited by that. So as we are looking at this issue of engagement and especially the engagement by the young generations, we also have to recognize that there are large elements within society who resist change. And so what would you say to them, especially a view of the present crisis in terms of their willingness or lack thereof with respect to engaging? Nina, how would you respond to that or how would you actually address that part of society? Yes, thank you. I think I will sort of build on what Chris said and Kathleen as well. So as educators, we are in a very privileged situation because we can enable and empower young people to understand that every single one of them is part of the solution. Everybody is part of the solution, no matter what your major is, everybody can contribute. And I just want to mention Project Drawdown, for example, which is a wonderful teaching tool that enables people to see that the necessary change involves knowledge from across the disciplines. And you know, the website ECO Challenge is another such tool. So in the class I'm just teaching class on globalization that I currently teach, we have practice convincing an imaginary Uncle Bill to understand the urgency of the moment from various angles. So spreading knowledge about possible solutions is key and it is possible. But at ASU we must make ecologization the core of our curriculum across disciplines. And I don't think we have any time to waste in this regard. This group here, several of us have lived or grew up in different cultures than we are living right now. And so, you know, different cultures respond to the present situation and the situation of the pressure on the earth system in general, differently. So Manfred, if you're looking at that, then you look at the Europe, compared to, let's say the US, compared to Asia, compared to the Global South. What are your thoughts about the willingness and why some cultures might be more willing to engage in the thought process of making different choices than others? I think that ultimately what we're experiencing now and what we have to shape on all levels is basically a change in the right and transformation in the right kind of direction. And most likely that is not happening voluntarily, but you have to basically force people to do that. The European Union is a prime example. It's completely dysfunctional, but yet manages to do right now some of the right things. I think the same applies here. What we need, the young people have an energy and desperation about their future, yet they are growing into structures that try to prevent their ideas from being transformed. When we're sitting in the middle, we can sort of influence some of the structures on the top level. We can support the energy of the youth through our education that we can provide them. And combining those forces, things can happen. There are tipping points not just in the earth system, there are also tipping points in social systems and movements. I think in that sense we can be optimistic that if enough of an energy and power goes in a certain direction, systems can change. Yet we need to also get our hands dirty and talk with those people that we don't necessarily want to talk to, who hold the power and try to guide them towards some alternative scenarios, which means we need to basically articulate alternative scenarios in less abstract language that we as academics usually do. And the urgency of that situation I think also forces us to come out of the ivory tower and be much more proactive and help find new solutions. So in that sense, I'm quite optimistic. Thanks. So to close out the conversation part of this symposium, I would like to ask each of you to sort of look ahead and talk a bit about where you see the opportunity and where you are optimistic that the opportunity will be taken. And let's start with Kathleen. To follow on Manfred's conversation. I really want to say policy has to be a big part of the solution oriented world that young people and all of us need to be engaged in a lot of people say oh that's Washington or that's the state capital that's not my thing. That's not that important. It is so important and as we're seeing in this pandemic the kind of resources that are coming out of our treasury to try to undergird the economy and we're seeing the decisions of where those resources are going. That to me shows that we have to engage and so getting involved civically seems very very important to me. How do you see the opportunities specifically with respect to engagement of students and, you know, the younger generation that we have on our campus. Well, I think we all know the expression from Winston Churchill never waste a crisis. And I think this is an opportunity to have universities and colleges which are struggling right now thinking about their own immediate futures. They don't know what's happening in the fall will students come back to really think not just about the nature of the institutions themselves but how can we reframe the way that we teach educate engage in ways that that don't rely on a 1000 year old model. We're still burdened in many ways by the past ways of educating students and thinking about how we can use this opportunity to think about new forms new types of engagement. That are not just about learning, but are about how students can be mobilized to take the kinds of actions that they, they, they know and that we know, quite frankly are necessary to build a better future the more resilient future that we need to watch. Thank you. Thanks, Nina. Are you optimistic. Looking forward. I think Nina is muted. Sorry. Well, I think I'm optimistic as an optimistic person, but I let me just not answer this question. I think they're clearly facing a lot of challenges but I think what is absolutely crucial is that we have to consider the different histories and distinct constituencies across the planet. And we, and we can also begin with our own state so what does Earth Day or what does the current covert 19 situation and climate change and all of that. What does it mean to indigenous groups who live on reservations. What does it mean to African Americans to Latinos to white folks in Arizona. And I think it's very important to keep these differences in mind. And with regard to ASU. I want to say again that we have to make ecologization the core of our curriculum across the university. It is what defines us and as we found out today we are already internationally recognized for that I was very excited about the good news so let's keep going on that path. And then we can be an important part of the solution. And what Nina refers to is the ranking in the time type education ranking for impact based on how well universities are doing with respect to addressing the STG's. And there is you was ranked number one in the US and number five internationally and mantred with respect to looking forward. How do you see the, for example, take take Germany. They had a very quick reaction of a group of scientists drawn together by the National Academy of Science. And it appears as if the leadership is taking that advice in exploring how they can reopen the basic functions of that country. How do you look at that at that experiment. Is that the right way to go. I think that is part of the solution. But what we really need is we need to get the right kind of global institutions that will help us address those crisis. And one thing if a national academy like the one in Germany that we know gets together and advises the German government that's one step, but then we need to go further and try to figure out how can that be coordinated globally at a time frame. That is much faster than we are currently operating under. There are things that are happening when the fact that most of the communications are now going on via zoom in real time globally. And it's already a first step because we're getting used to quickly respond and coordinate. The question is what institutions are we building that stable robust in place to. We can solve and address the next crisis which inevitably come about. And I think there is another opportunity because academia science technology is rapidly reorganizing, not voluntarily, but because they are forced to. And those new structures can actually be exploited and deployed for the challenges of the future. This concludes our conversation. And I would like to invite those of you who want to see more about some of the thoughts of our leading scientists here to visit our channel on medium where you can read a piece that we wrote about Earth Day but also other pieces that are addressing significant events that have happened over the past roughly year or so. We are now getting to part three and it's a great pleasure for me to welcome Dr. Michael Crowe, president of ASU, to give us his view of this historic day. President Crowe has been and continues to be one of the most committed supporters of the sustainability agenda. Like nobody else, he has transformed Arizona State University and academia as a whole in the pursuit of a planet on which humankind can thrive now and in the future. And so I would like to invite President Crowe to give us his thoughts on this particular moment in time where at the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we are in a deep crisis. Well, thank you, Peter. Can everybody hear me okay? At least the panel you can wave. Okay, great. And so it's really exciting to have a chance to be here in our distributed modality and I haven't seen some of you in a while except by this method and some of you haven't seen in a while so it's nice to see the panel. I know each of the panel members well and enjoy the last few minutes having an opportunity to listen to I thought the very hearty and productive discussion. It's exciting about Earth Day without thinking about you know how is how it is that we got there. And so for all the doom and gloom that people think of today they don't, they don't remember what it was like in 1970. And so I was in the fall of 1969. I was at some sort of book sale or something and I came from a non booked family and I bought this book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and so I picked this thing up and I thought it would be useful to me to just understand, you know I saw sort of the cover and it was an interesting story and I wondered what she was writing about and then I read it and I thought, you know it was just unbelievable to me, the way she described the world and then I went to the library. I lived in rural Southern Maryland at the time. I was in St. Mary's County my dad was stationed at the Tuxent River Naval Air Station as a part of a of an anti submarine warfare patrol squadron searching for Russian submarines filled with nuclear missiles and we lived, we lived in this community. And I remember I went to the town library and the base library and I studied about Rachel Carson and I saw that she had died shortly after she wrote this fantastic book of complications from cancer just a few months in fact before my mother had passed away in the in from cancer as a young woman. And so I became riveted to this person Rachel Carson. And there was an introduction to the book. A quote that she put which was this logic which I think we had lost track of by Albert Schweitzer who said man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. And by destroying their man humans have lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall meaning this realization in our evolution as a as a as a creature on the planet completely dependent upon the natural systems on which we are totally reliant and completely embedded and actually derivative of we're actually derivative of those same systems. We had at that point come to the point where we no longer knew where we were. We know no longer knew who we were how to interact and the way we had interacted in the past and so I think Silent Spring was this, this unbelievable awakening for lots and lots of people. I think where we've come, you know that I got the book in 68 it was written in 62 and by 1970, you've got Earth Day you have the National Environmental Protection Act you have Richard Nixon of all people, signing into law the creation of the environmental Protection Agency and the rethinking of all kinds of things and so there was just this realization so I see this 50 year ago event Earth Day to be an ignition point. A point where our concerns became so great that that you know a person brought 20 million people a measly number of people together in terms of the scale of the planet but huge for the moment 20 million people and said, we don't have the right relationship back to Schweizer. We do not have the capacity to foresee order for stall we do not we're not sustainable. We go path forward unless we become sustainable now if you look at what's happened now imagine, depending on when you think human beings homo sapiens sapiens took on this particular form. We're thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of generations in our modern species form. This just occurred within my lifetime. So we're one generation two generations into this. Two generations compared to the 99.99999% of human history before this. You know we have done unbelievable things global sustainability is an issue. It's an issue 20 million people don't know about sustainability now billions of people know about sustainability. And that is the people are actually further ahead than the leaders in a lot of places that there's a there's a there's a deeper understanding farmers understand this intimately all over the world. We understand this in what we're eating all over the world now in new ways not everyone far from it but in ways that we never understood before and you know I happen to have been alive in 1970. The cars were producing 657075 times the level of pollution that a car produces today, in which you couldn't even have discussions about about cleaning things up prior to that and so. So we now live in this unbelievable moment of sustainability where it is an issue and it's understood as an issue. And so, so, and I've got a simple message today and the message is that you know in those 50 years. We've made unbelievable progress there weren't environmental studies programs there weren't schools of sustainability. There weren't the kinds of new there wasn't in the way that we think of it now organic agriculture there there wasn't this whole notion of rethinking the food supply there there there wasn't this. There wasn't this drive for renewable energy and new energy systems there wasn't this notion that the petroleum industry. It was in a different position than it was even, you know, eight weeks ago was a thing of the past and was going to be a historic vestige of our humanity and of our species. None of that existed at the time no one could have even thought of anything at this scale except for the rare individual who could see around the corner, the corner. So, so here at issue you know what's so exciting to me is that, you know, we've been able to find ourselves in this first generation this first intellectual generation to be what I call the bow wave and so if you've ever been on a sailboat or a big boat there's a wave that's out in the front of the boat, and it's lifted by the motion of the boat but there are often dolphins out there. I've noted in the different parts of the ocean that I've been in that are taking advantage of the energy of the boat now we at issue are taking advantage of the energy of this 50 year wave, this significant wave of change. And so we are in the bow wave and we are one of if not one of the most important dolphins. We have the global futures laboratory which is now going to go to a whole new scale under the global futures laboratory and as a part of what it does is going to be the, the second generation emergence of our Institute for sustainability and the future of innovations we were going to be expanding new schools into the College of global futures where you know we're continuing to evolve where we've got networks that we're a part of a new networks that we're establishing we've got solutions that are being derived we've got we've got thousands and thousands of people engage we, we set out to become the, you know, the, the most impactful stg university in the United States, we are, and one of the most important universities in the world for a set of goals that are unbelievably important for our species and so the principle part of the message that I have for you and I've been thinking about this since I read that book in October of 1969 I read that book between October 11 and October 13 1969. I remember it vividly because I had a huge impact on me and I remember stupid thing. And so and so what I really wanted to say to everybody in the ASU community is that we have a unique responsibility. Unique, absolutely unique going forward. We are in the bow wave position. We have assets, blessed with talent, blessed with intellect, blessed with moment, blessed with technology, all these things that we have moving forward and now it's really up to us to make certain that we actually further this intellectual engagement, where we now have back to the capacity to foresee the capacity to forestall and the capacity to end up not making our relationship with the natural systems in which we're dependent the earth, unsustainable but by making them in fact sustainable. Now here's our problem. We are highly contaminated by the Academy itself, and we do not have a concept of time, which is appropriate to the concept of the rate of change that we're presently in the middle of. And so you're going to see me going forward, pushing as hard as possible to produce as many new intellectual cultural scientific creative pedagogical changes as we possibly can. It really is up to us. Who happened to be one of the lead dolphins in this particular dynamic of change, and it really is up to us to take this unique responsibility and seize the moment this 50 years 50 years is all we've had at this and and to speed our evolution. So, so to Peter and everybody else that's listening I mean Earth Day is a fantastic day to remember this fantastic day to be recognized and it's a fantastic day to say no matter what we're engaged in in coven 19 is just another one of the indicators of the complexity of the world that we are now in and and where it's going and what it means and so it really is important for us to take this unique responsibility and make it as positive as we possibly can. Not just for ASU but for all of the Academy, not just for the Academy but for all of society so thank you and happy birthday Earth Day. Thank you so much, Michael and it's great to have that picture of the dolphins which I saw many times myself being out in the ocean, and also the, you know, the, the reassertion of the commitment that university has it is to all of us to not experience the environment here it is a privilege to work in that environment and, you know, make a difference, at least via the forefront of trying to change the Academy so that the difference can be made. And I would like to thank President Crowe, my colleagues and friends, and everybody who's listening, stay safe, and this crisis will go over and we will move on using the opportunities that are offered to us by this. This is my office by the way for those of you that haven't been in my office. In my hangout the last few weeks. And my kids in the desk here. Thank you very much. Thank you.