 talk about how climate change has affected the spread of zoonotic disease. So the direct answer is that we see diseases that are spread by vectors, especially vectors that are expanding their range given that the tropics are expanding with global warming and likewise other climate zones are shifting their footprint, if you will, or their location. We see mosquitoes, ticks, sand flies, various types of insects that can be vectors, snails. These sorts of carriers of zoonotic disease found in new locations. We also know that certain species of mosquito are more aggressive in warm air. So we are seeing diseases spread into new areas where they had not been a problem before or had not even been seen before. Then we have just the general rise of heat which has led to an increase in dengue fever, a 30-fold increase in dengue fever over the last 50 years simply because of the general rise in air temperature. We also have an increase in extreme weather events, flooding especially, which throws human communities in contact with very dirty water, very dirty conditions, even after the water has drained away. You have sanitary problems, standing pools of water tend to attract insects and dirty water itself, water itself is a vector. It carries disease with it, both in the form of insects and other types of animals or just in the flowing liquid itself. So through extreme weather events, through heating of the air, and through expansion of the ranges of disease-carrying insects, and it is not just insects, it turns out that deer and primates and large megafauna are also vectors. HIV, for instance, is a zoonotic disease that came from primates, came from chimpanzees or bonavos in Africa. I can understand mosquitoes, but how do we catch these diseases from other vector animals? Well, one direct way is the wet markets. The bush means, if you will. So hunting, even though you might think it's a rather limited activity, one animal at a time, it actually is a profoundly important source of nutrition for a lot of populations in a lot of areas of the world. And so that is one way where humans come directly in contact with environments where these diseases perhaps had resided in equilibrium with the local animal population. Humans, as our population expands, as we tend to damage and destroy more and more natural ecosystems, and we do that for various reasons that we can get into as well, we are exposing ourselves to new forms of disease because we are moving into natural environments that had not been disturbed previously. It almost sounds like we're moving closer to the disease-bearing organisms and they're moving closer to us and for different reasons. Yes, in fact, that's a very good way to put it because climate change can disturb these disease-bearing organisms so that they leave that environment. Wildfire, for instance, will drive animals obviously out of their environment, plus changes in the climate zones will cause them to move to new locations. So they are coming out of their equilibrium areas, their natural environments, they are moving away from those, increasing the potential to contact human communities, and likewise human communities are destroying natural environments as we largely seek to clear land to grow soy and corn to feed our growing desire for beef. We also use corn for the poultry market as well as for pork, and that gets into another source of zoonotic disease, which is factory farming. So we pack, in the case of poultry, we'll pack hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of birds, perhaps even over a thousand birds into a large warehouse, and you can have disease move through this population and that disease can afford to become more virulent, more pathogenic. In nature, a disease typically will be kept from becoming more virulent because it can't afford to continuously kill its host. A disease that kills its host ends up going nowhere, so evolution will select in favor of the less virulent strains of a particular virus. But in a factory farm where dead and diseased animals are constantly removed and healthy animals are put in, you have an endless supply of hosts, and this tends to naturally select in favor of more virulent strains of a virus. So our method of beef, chicken, ham, and other forms of meat in the western world actually is a spawning ground for these zoonotic diseases as well. And two questions. Is this happening in the U.S., or is this because of U.S. appetite? And then two, and maybe firstly, what does this have to do with climate change? Well, it's happening in the U.S., it's also happening elsewhere. So the U.S. is not any longer engaged in widespread habitat destruction in order to have our animal food market. But we do need to feed the beef, the poultry, and the pork. And we do that with corn, typically it's hybridized corn, that is grown, a lot of it is grown in the U.S., but we also ship it in, and the EU also ships it in from southern hemisphere countries. And in southern hemisphere countries, in order to increasingly grow more and more grain, they are clearing forests, they are clearing land. So these are developing nations that have not already cleared out much of their land as we have in the northern hemisphere. In fact, I've been reading lately, and that doesn't mean that this is recent news, this is really old news, that the northern hemisphere, the EU, North America are really exporting the damage associated with our food choices to the southern hemisphere, which is generally speaking, other than Australia, characterized with still developing nations who are desperate for new forms of revenue, and the purchase of crops, of the product of their crops in order to feed our desire for animal meat is an important new source of revenue for them in the last decade or two. We're talking like Brazil, or where are we talking about? Yeah, we're talking around the edges of the Amazon rainforest, Argentina, Brazil, and then also in Africa. Has this affected you personally? I mean, have you become a vegetarian or anything? Yeah, I have, I've become a vegetarian. When did this happen? Oh, three years ago, I guess. Yeah. Because you just saw this link in this relationship, and you said you don't want to be part of it? Yeah. So if I'm going to choose to speak out about these events, I've got to walk the talk. And so the electric car, the solar panels, vegetarian, I'm trying to live in a way that is consistent with counteracting the damage that we're doing to the planet. And I want to get back to the sort of end of the last question you asked, which is what does all this have to do with climate change? Well, humanity is causing two problems that threaten our economy and our society. One is we are changing the climate, right? Global warming continues to increase. In fact, this year, 2020, with the NASA data set may prove to be the hottest year on record. It might be 2016, which is currently the hottest year on record. But we are also driving a pervasive decline of life on this planet. So our economy is extractive. It's not regenerative. It's not cyclical. We are engaging the Western, the developed nations of the world, are engaging in a form of capitalism that extracts, but is not overly concerned with replacements or renewal or renovation of those resources. And we have now gotten to the point where we have affected massive amounts of land surface on this planet. 58% of Earth's land surface is under intense human pressure. And in only the past 20 years, just this new century, an area of ecologically intact land the size of Mexico, it was ecologically intact. The size of Mexico has now been lost. It's now been destroyed. And that's mostly in the form of grasslands and rainforests. Only 25% of the land area on Earth's surface can still be considered wilderness. And we include in there the Sahara and other desert regions and the permafrost areas of the Arctic Circle. So areas that are not going to help us too much in terms of growing food. Right. So we have extracted and extracted as our population has grown simultaneously our desire for more and more stuff to make our lives complete has grown. And GDP has increased per capita use of resources has increased. Global trade is now separating demand from supply. And we are right. We demand things here in Hawaii, you in California that are coming from Borneo or the Congo or the Amazon, both in terms of grain to feed animal meat, but also in terms of mineral wealth. And the grain itself uses the soil resource and the farming practices are not very regenerative. They apply tons of fertilizer and pesticides in order to allow the crops to grow. It's very inefficient, but it does pollute local watersheds. So this has been going on and growing with human population, but planet Earth has not expanded. Right. This is one planet with this growing demand for its resources. So that and climate change are the two big issues they intersect in many, many areas and they self-amplify or mutually amplify in many areas as well. Is it, how optimistic is it? Are you, is it reasonable to think that humanity can change enough so we don't inflict these crises upon ourselves? There are a million bright points of light where small communities of people have come together to reforest areas, to protect natural environments, to support each other in their food choices, to attempt to spend their money locally and buy local products that do not have a large carbon footprint, to vote in a way that puts the environment first, that puts preservation of our planet first. There are a million examples of this very optimistic looking behavior, but when you add them up, they do not amount to enough, not near enough, not within orders of magnitude enough. We need to completely rewire our electric electrical distribution system around the planet. The same electricity distribution system that has taken us 150 years to build, it needs to be expanded an equal amount within 15 years and then between 2035 and 2050 doubled again. That's just our electricity distribution and everything we do needs to become electricity based. The internal combustion engine has to completely go away, so from food to what we purchase, to what we manufacture, to where we get our power, to how we live our lives, to our transportation systems. It's not just little twiddling of the knobs, it's a complete order of magnitude redo on every sector of our economy. And you don't see this COVID-19 as sort of a grand teachable moment here. Not yet, not yet. Maybe it'll happen. I don't think we're talking about, so I think that we're going to break right through one point, so the UN has created these two targets of one and a half degrees and two degrees Celsius above the background temperature, the natural temperature pre-industrial revolution. Lots of people, lots of analyses now are indicating that 1.5 will break through that target this decade or towards the end of this decade and 2.0 before 2050, sometime in the next 30 years. By mid-century, we'll have breach 2.0. We'll be living in a very, very difficult world with billion dollar extreme weather disasters happening all over the world and human communities with severe food and water insecurity and a fair amount of violent conflict going along with that. That severe disruption to natural ecosystems, severe disease pandemics working their way, especially through various provincial, state-level populations. But at that point, I think we will have achieved what we need to achieve. It's just we're going we're going to enter a very dangerous world before we achieve the changes in our economy that we need to achieve. Then we can start to do the about face, but I think sea level is going to be multi-meter. In other words, it's going to be well above six feet and just all sorts of pain and grief for lots of portions of the human society. Hopefully we can learn from this and develop a more caring society that realizes we have one planet. Let's not ruin this one opportunity. Let's not ruin our home. Let's regenerate it. Do you think in any sense that COVID-19 is a climate change event? It's a climate change event in that the disruption of natural ecosystems, which in its very small little way led to the Wuhan virus, if you will, which led to the exposure in Wuhan of humans to COVID-19 is a tiny little stage on which the entire human experiment is behaving with regard to the whole planet. It's so important to realize that climate change is not the only game in town. It's also biodiversity loss and extractive capitalism, if you will. But they have the same causes, right? Yeah, they're all part of the same mosaic. They're all part of the same human species on one planet. Figuring out, still figuring out how do we all live here in a way that is sustainable? Climate change is one thread in that cloth, but it's more than just a thread. Biodiversity loss is more than just a thread, but there are these four or five fundamental tenets of change, climate change, biodiversity loss, and associated with those and causing those and resulting from those is our food systems feeding humans, our manufacturing systems, our transportation systems, and all of these are related to polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels, and they're all related to disruptions to the natural world. That's where the COVID component is. That's where all the other pandemic potential zoonotic diseases are. We have to treat all of these through an overriding change in our economic model. That's a tall order, Professor. There are lots of confusing areas. There are many things still to be worked out, but we have enough technology, we have enough understanding to do the change now. It's fair to characterize this as having moved from the realm of technology development into the realm of social change. Really, what needs to take place now is social change. With social change that recognizes the need for us to live in a way that does not continuously damage the planet, we will be taking the first steps to avoiding future pandemics. We are so lucky that COVID-19 has a relatively low mortality rate. I haven't checked recently, but it's around 1 percent, perhaps, of the people who get COVID-19 ultimately end up dying. There are strains of avian flu with 60, 60 percent mortality rates and other types of viral infections with huge mortality rates. We're so lucky that COVID is not one of those. It is a symptom. It's a symptom of a poor relationship with nature, just as climate change can be considered a symptom as a poor relationship with nature. Well, I hate to end on such a downer note, but I can't inject any false optimism into this myself. I mean, there are lots of very powerful tools that could come to play. We need governments to steer economies towards them. We need governments to emphasize these tools, new forms of developing electricity, new forms of producing food, new forms of manufacturing. We need the governments to take this over, and that's one reason why people who do not view government as trustworthy expand their lack of trust to all things associated with that, which includes science. I want to thank you for spending so much time with me, Professor. It's really been enlightening.