Alan Weisman: I started this book because I was really, really, really, really depressed about how I saw systems breaking down under the pressure that my own species, which, you know, I love my species. We’ve created a lot of beauty, but you know, we’ve become so numerous, and our impact has become so powerful. We’ve become kind of too much of a good thing. I was worried that there was no way that we were going to be over able to overcome the relentlessness of our, the pressures that we put on the rest of the planet. But by the end of this book, I was so uplifted by all these people and by the variety of people that I found in, in the most extraordinarily different circumstances, each of them daring to hope and oftentimes succeeding. I’m there with them. This ain’t over.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo. Bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists, working on the front lines of conservation shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today, on the Newscast, we speak with veteran journalist and environmental reporter Alan Weisman, whose career has taken him to over 60 countries. He’s the acclaimed author of books such as The World Without Us. His latest Read Hope Dies. Last is about the incredible humans working to save our planet. Weisman visited a diverse array of locations and solutions, some nature-based, some created in a lab, and others done in meeting rooms. In this conversation, he takes us through his reasons and methods for selecting these stories, the depression that prompted him to make the book and the hope that it left him with. I count myself among the readers who put this book down with a deeper appreciation for what exactly hope is and isn’t and how as activist Michael Greenberg states in the book is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The stories in this book, which leave no stone unturned, including technology, are not techno utopian, nor are they unrealistically optimistic. They are rather the product of people who are quite bravely challenging the status quo, institutional power and science itself. Or as Alan says, they’re not waiting around for miracles. They’re out there trying to make them.

Alan, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast.

Alan: It’s my pleasure.

Mike: So, as I was mentioning to you earlier, I read your book. I absolutely loved it. And I want to start by talking about the first chapter. So you open it with a chapter on Azzam Alwash and the Mesopotamian Revitalization Project, which I think is a really interesting way to start the book. but this initiative he helped create in Iraq is to address. The severe impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, and it focuses on revitalizing, you know, water systems, but it wasn’t enacted. And Azzam says something that I’ve heard said about the United States, frankly, and he says the political will doesn’t exist now. Things must worsen before people see. They must make a politically courageous decision. The crisis will force them to take stock. In the meantime, we keep daring to dream big. And so Alan, I feel like this quote could describe many countries right now. What do you think of Azzam’s thoughts?

Alan: Sort of in reverse order. Daring to dream big is a theme throughout this book. My book is called Hope Dies Last, and I portray people like Azzam, that I found in all walks of life. I mean, everything from, you know, scientists and engineers to religious figures, to even military people who were all united in the sense of something has got to happen. We can’t wait around for it to happen, but we must try to make it happen. They’re people who refuse to give up. Azzam was a great example of that because fortunately for me as a writer, he began in one of the most symbolically potent places on Earth that nearly all readers are going to feel some resonance with. I mean, the, his work in the Mesopotamian wetlands, which was the biggest wetlands in the world before Saddam Hussein drained it in the 1990s to flush out Shiite rebels who were trying to overthrow ’em. This is not only the cradle of Western civilization and worldwide, it’s probably the first cradle of all civilizations according to archeologists. But it’s also the setting of the Biblical Garden of Eden, which has, you know, deep importance for three of the world’s major religions. So by setting something there, it’s easy for me to get people’s attention. And then what Azzam does, is utterly brilliant. And again, very similar to what I found in so many other places. He goes against the conventional wisdom. Everybody said that after a decade when Saddam was finally deposed by the United States troops, that all of this wetland was lost. The roots had been desiccated too long. Nothing would ever sprout there. And he tried and tried and tried to raise international funds to undo the damage. Couldn’t. Finally, he and one of his co-conspirators and other civil engineer just rent a Earth mover for 30 bucks, $30 us and punch some holes in it, flood the marsh, it stinks to high heavens for about six weeks, but then suddenly green starts to appear, and today it’s a wetland restored, it’s a functioning ecosystem. There’s fish, there’s turtles, there are migratory birds. It’s really kind of wonderful. And yet to your question, is it going to be enough to inspire the nations of the world to act? Or what will it take to inspire them to act? Do the disasters have to keep deepening, further and further? And frankly, that’s not for me to answer in this book. It’s for me to leave that question hanging. But in the meantime, should show how individuals, just like all of us can just pick it up, pick up the mantle that nations have avoided hoisting, and make things happen. Instead of sitting around waiting for miracles, start to try to make them.

Mike: I must say, you really did collect some truly, and I don’t use these words lightly hope inspiring examples in this book, and I’m just curious how you came across all of these different stories. Did you find them, you know, through new sources or, you know, mainstream ones or nonprofit ones like Mongabay or through NGOs or grassroots networks? How did you come across these incredible stories?

Alan: First of all, yes to all those things, and thank you Mongabay for oftentimes providing all kinds of wonderful research for, for journalists like me to archive and to consult. You know as a journalist myself, I have been traveling the world. I’ve worked in almost 60 countries and I’ve got a lot of tentacles out there, and I get these stories, I hear from people. There’s a researcher who worked with me who, helped me find a couple of really key people for this book. I, I mean, you know, midway in the book, I get this idea that I really need to go to the Netherlands. Because it’s a place that the world is looking to more and more to figure out, you know, how have they kept from drowning over the past thousand years? You know, that’s an issue as sea levels keep rising, that is concerning more and more, places on Earth. I mean, after all, most of the world’s financial capitals are coastal cities. My researcher helped me find exactly the person I needed in the Netherlands who then connected me to everybody else that I needed. And, as I was reading about the Netherlands, I discovered that they have, oh, this really interesting agreement with Bangladesh to try to recreate what they’ve done only four times bigger with rivers much more powerful than the ones that drained through the European rivers that drained through the Netherlands like, the Rhine. And we’re talking about the Ganges and the Brahmaputura that come pouring out of the Himalayas, carrying an Everest worth of silt with them. So I realized, oh, I’ve gotta go there. So oftentimes, you know, just one thing leads me to another and as I’ve been doing, ever since, a lot of your listeners will know my book two books ago, The World Without Us. Whenever I go to some place to find some person who I want to portray, I tell them what my book is about and I ask what their suggestions are, and oftentimes they’re the ones who lead me to more.

Mike: Incredible. I mean, that’s, yeah, the, the stories you found, I must emphasize again, are truly incredible. So thank you for sharing with us how you found that. You ask and answer the question in the book, why does hope struggle against itself? In reference to the phrase ‘Hope Against Hope.’ And you explain it really well in the book, but I’d love to hear you say it here. Why does hope struggle against itself?

Alan: You know, the phrase hope against hope, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, it first comes up in the Bible. It was actually the Apostle Paul who coined that phrase Hope Against Hope, and he was referring something to something that tied very nicely with my intro of the book in this biblical landscape. And that was describing how Abraham at age 100 with a wife who is 90, Sarah, could possibly conceive a child. And it entered the lexicon of many of the world’s languages. The word hope, even today in the Latinate languages like Spanish and Portuguese has multiple meanings. It’s not just, you know, oh boy, I want something to happen, but it’s…there’s this uncertainty, it might not happen. So I’m just waiting to see if it will happen. And in some of the subjunctive applications of this verb, it’s something that we really don’t think is ever gonna happen, but we are still longing for it to happen. And that’s something that used to exist in English. It’s still there in a subliminal way, and in my title, Hope Dies Last, I mean it in all those ways. Even that phrase, it could mean that until the very end, there’s still hope, or, you know, in the end, maybe even hope itself dies. I’m hoping it’s not the latter. Literally, I want it to be the former and the people who I discovered, in all my travels in about a dozen countries, certainly exemplify and personify that definition.

Mike: Yeah, I noticed that. It seems like everyone knows that they’re pushing a giant rock up a hill, but they’re doing it anyway. And, one of those people is, Molly Jahn, and you mentioned that at Imperial College, everyone is like getting funded to improve photosynthesis for biofuels, which you deftly explain is not really a solution to our energy issues. And this is a thing, I think it’s glossed over too much in mainstream coverage. You know that what governments give grants to and who funds research and what research gets funded is arguably a waste of time and money to actually solve the problems that need to be solved. So I was wondering, could you talk about Molly Jahn’s like really incredible wake- up call to the people working on nitrogen and what she’s doing to save agriculture and human society.

Alan: Yeah, Molly Jahn, is among plant breeders, is really a famous name. And, all over the world people grow some of the wonderful cultivars as she’s created, delicata squash is probably the most famous, and I mean, delicata squash existed before, but she developed a variety of it that is completely resistant to all sorts of, evils that will attack squash plants and some wonderful cantaloupe that are some of the sweetest cantaloupe that are on the market. But at a certain point she began to realize that agriculture has just kind of reached its limits of usefulness in order to feed the number of people that we have on the planet right now. We are taking up so much space over almost half the non-frozen planet is devoted to just feeding one species our own or our livestock. And, you know, between us and our livestock, that’s 96% of mammalian life now. Meaning only 4% is wildlife. So we are just cutting down more forests and we’re creating more monocultures, and we are feeding them, with a method that we discovered in the second decade of the 20th century, which was instead of limiting the amount of crops that we could grow to those that could take advantage of the nitrogen that plants naturally fix. And there’s only, you know, relatively few plants that can pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and, fix it with microbes that they host on their roots. Plants like legumes, clovers, beans, we invented a way that we could just pull it out of the atmosphere ourselves and chemically slather it on the ground. It involves an enormous amount of energy to make that happen. The feed stock itself is natural gas and Molly Jahn realized that just all this nitrogen was having some enormously unpleasant environmental impacts, both the greenhouse gases that it was, contributing. Because when it breaks down in the field, then you get nitrous oxide, which after methane and carbon dioxide is the worst of all the greenhouse gases, and also downstream. The miles of all the great rivers on Earth now, there are these huge dead zones created by all the nitrogen that that will then feed a lot of algae that then will die off and their bloom will suck out all the, all the oxygen. So, in my book, I’ve got a scene where Molly is addressing a group of scientists from the UK and the United States who have all won these million, million, multimillion dollar grants to improve the way plants that crops uptake nitrogen. And she asked them the question, do we really need any more nitrogen? Instead of asking yourself how your research is affecting plants, how is it affecting the planet? And she herself has simply turned her back on breeding any more terrestrial plants, and she got the United States government, through a very, very deaf maneuver, to fund research into how can we create food from thin air using the excess carbon dioxide that we’ve pumped up there, plus the nitrogen that is in our atmosphere, and the hydrogen that exists in water molecules to add them to microbes that we can ferment here on the planet very, very easily, and turn ’em into tasty and, and a variety of textured foods. Her funder for this, which to my surprise turned out to be the more forward looking agency in the United States government, was the Defense Department. They have a n agency within the DOD called DARPA. It’s the defense advanced research projects agency, and they’re the ones who are thinking 50 years into the future, what are the security needs going to be of the country? What new challenges are we going to meet? And then coming up with solutions for them funding contractors who design stuff that hasn’t even been invented. I would say that the US Department of Defense, even though ironically it’s probably the biggest carbon producer on the planet, is also the first US agency to really recognize that the biggest security threat that the United States and by t he rest of the world has in the future is climate change. And, in my book, I follow some of the researchers that Molly Jahn has gotten to fund to come up with ways of actually changing agriculture into what she calls ubiqui-culture. Because this is something that if it could be done, every house could become a farm.

Mike: Yeah. I have to say I was surprised by the funding source because obviously, you know, DARPA, it doesn’t come without some controversy here because it is the defense department, but you do point out in the book that DARPA has funded some of the most ubiquitous life-changing technologies that we have today, such as like the internet itself. So, it seemed like it was emphasized that whatever she’s working on would at some point become large scale and not like purely just used for defense purposes. If I have that correct. Am I right about that?

Alan: Yeah, you do. And it’s really kind of a fun chapter because it, it portrays some of DARPA’s, you know, colossal failures too, you know, like robots that can feed, you know, energize themselves by foraging for food and, you know, just, you know, stuff that simply hasn’t worked. But again, they’re an agency that is not afraid to take big risks. They’re not afraid to fail in the process of finding us things that do work, you know, GPS is one of those many examples. To research this book, I had to go into some uncomfortable zones for me. I had to look at technology, which my initial response is always, you know, can technology possibly find us ways out of the messes that technology has created itself. Molly Jahn herself says, paraphrasing Einstein, that when you find yourself, you know, in a paradigm shift as we are now facing on this planet, the solution is not necessarily the same kind of thinking that got you there in the first place. In looking at the military, I mean, later on this book I travel with some military people, and yet, everybody, I think has to be part of the solution now. The Defense Department of the United States has an enormous budget, and if some of that enormous budget can get thrown at trying to help the climate crisis, then w e’re gonna have to play with them. You know, finding time to change the consciousness of everybody on Earth so they realize that you know what we are up against. I don’t think we have that kind of time. The world is going to fall apart. You know, before we can really raise everybody’s awareness. But if we can get some people who are either enlightened visionaries, like the ones that I portray in this book, or even some people who are acting in their self-interest to do something for the good of the planet, then sure, we’ve gotta try.

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You know, and speaking of things falling apart, I might have a long thread to this question, but…so I lived in Arizona for about seven years of my life and part of it was in the Prescott area and I had no idea that the NGOs Earth First or the Center for Biological Diversity had such an impact on stopping commercial logging via the protection of endangered species. This was not knowledge to me and I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge around there. But you know, I lived at about 6,000 feet and there’s just pine trees everywhere. It’s amazing. And the Endangered Species Act was used to stop, you know, impacts to many threatened species. So, this is clearly like a success story. I think it’s fair to describe it as that way. What do you feel about the prospects or the strength of using the legal system to win environmental battles in in America right now? Do you have faith that the Endangered Species Act is going to survive the next three years, for example?

Alan: You know, first of all, I’m glad that you got to live at 6,000 feet outside of Prescott, Arizona. I did that for 20 years of my own life, and I know exactly how beautiful it is. It’s something that I…you know, I can still smell those pine trees, the vanilla bark of the Ponderosa Pines. There’s a school in Prescott, Arizona called Prescott College that was an incubator for a couple of the protagonists, who later, at one point in their life found themselves in Earth First, which was an organization that really try to take the environment by storm rather than waiting for any laws. They broke laws with impunity. They would chain themselves to logging gear. They would chain themselves to mining gear, and they frequently got thrown in jail. In my book, I tell how a couple of those express good students and a couple of their friends all ended up being contract biologists in Southern New Mexico, and they realized that their employer, which was the US Forest Service, who is employing them on a bird count, they were counting Mexican spotted owls. What they were actually trying to do was to prove that there were enough spotted owls out there that they would not be covered by the United States Endangered Species Act, which was an act that was signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, a Republican president, that basically says that a species that is endangered or in threat, threatened by extinction, must be protected. And that includes protecting its natural range, what they technically called its critical habitat, whether it’s on public lands or private lands. And you know, this proved to be one of the most important, and most powerful environmental laws on the planet. So, what happened with these contract biologists? When they found out that they were being used basically for the Forest Service, they decided to sue ’em and they got fired, of course, but it turned out that they won their lawsuit. It was actually uncontestable and under the Endangered Species Act that the US government was trying to clear cut some of the areas where an endangered, it may have just been listed as threatened at the time, but that was enough to employ the act. So subsequently, I’ll skip through it here, but I show how the organization that they eventually founded, which is called the Center for Biological Diversity, has sued on behalf of endangered species over 900 times and they’ve won over 80% of all of their cases. And they sue, you know, from everything from polar bears to orchids, some endangered orchid that only shows up every seven years and then for about a couple of hours and then it dies back, or slugs. The idea being if you save a species, you are also saving the landscape that supports it and that supports all these other species. You are saving an ecosystem now. Under the Trump administration, I regret to say that Trump has sort of pulled a fast one. He has not tried to repeal the Endangered Species Act so much as redefine what an endangered species is. He wants that act to be applied to just the creatures themselves, the creatures or the plants themselves. But not to the surrounding habitat. It’s an uncoupling that would basically allow exploitation to run rampant on those valuable habitats. So, of course, the Center for Biological Diversity is suing again, and many other groups in the United States are suing again. And this is gonna go all the way up to the Supreme Court, which these days tends to side with Trump. But there is an enormous percentage of the United States, including people from both parties who really value what the Endangered Species Act has done. And, you know, stay tuned to see whether the US legal system is robust enough to uphold a congressional law that only Congress should be able to repeal, not a presidential act. You know, is the legal system strong enough? We’re gonna find out. But if it isn’t in this country, it is in other countries and the United States has, maybe what we’re discovering now, is that the United States has just become a little bit too powerful and maybe Donald Trump’s failure as a president, because certainly things are gonna crumble around him, will in some ways just sort of reestablish some political order in this world. That’s been a long time coming.

Mike: On a related note here, Alan, while covering protests against the construction of Enbridge’s Line three oil pipeline in Minnesota, you were wearing press credentials, but you were arrested, searched, your phone was confiscated, and you were never allowed a telephone call and you were put in a solitary windowless cell and charged with misdemeanor trespassing, which can come with an up to a year in prison and a $3,000 fine. Because of this, you say the United States was the most dangerous country you visited for this book, and I think that says something about the state of press freedom in the US. So, do you have any specific reflections to share with us about the current political context, about the state of press freedom in the US and the danger journalism is under?

Alan: You know, you asked me a question earlier about misapplied tax dollars all throughout the world, and when I was arrested, by the way, I was strip searched, that was because a pipeline was being rammed from the Athabascan tar sands, along with coal, the dirtiest source of any petroleum based energy, all the way through to the Port of Duluth Superior on, you know, on Lake Superior. And it was going through prime wild rice and hunting and fishing grounds, underneath 200 bodies of water in, Ojibwe country in northern Minnesota. And the Ojibwe women who are the water protectors had been virtually lying down in front of bulldozers and ultimately to no avail. But that was during the Biden administration. The Biden administration was just as guilty as the Trump administration has been for subsidizing fossil fuels both in the form of direct subsidies to the petroleum industry, which also is the producer of all plastics and the producer of all that nitrogen based fertilizer. Worldwide, petroleum subsidies run about $6 trillion. I mean, this is insanity because we could so easily be turning this around and doing something that would not damage the environment at all. We already have technology that’s available to do this. So, when I was arrested, you know, I was arrested by a project that the Biden administration had green-lighted. It’s too bad because, others, like keystone, Joe Biden had closed down, but you know, he comes from a political era. You know, he’s kinda locked back in the seventies and eighties when you did horse trading. You won some and you lose some. You tried to be…you tried to compromise, but there’s no compromising on the environment. So now under Donald Trump, we journalists in the United States are girding for the worst. We are girding for more harassment. There’s already been tremendous harassment against television networks, and some of them like CBS have caved in. They’ve paid him a lot of money and they’ve made promises, you know, to pull punches on their coverage. Same with the Washington Post. There’s a lot of the rest of us who are waiting to be picked up. This is gonna be a fight. And, you know, there was a book that was published in the 1930s by Sinclair Lewis who won the Nobel Prize for literature. The book was called, It Can’t Happen Here, used to sit on my dad’s bookshelf and I understood what it was about. The idea that somebody in the book, there’s this clownish guy that nobody takes very seriously ’cause he’s so extreme. But then he ends up winning the Republican nomination for the presidency and then the presidency of the United States, and he’s the antagonist. The protagonist in that book is a journalist, and by the end of that book, the journalist is a guerilla warrior. So, I don’t know where this is headed other than I have a lot of colleagues worldwide who are not going to quit. They have been risking their lives in Gaza. They can risk their lives here too, if we have to.

Mike: I want to pick up on something that you mentioned about fossil fuel subsidies, because you know it’s a common refrain that we hear, especially at climate cops, that we need, you know, quote unquote bankable solutions. And, you know, towards the end of the book, you outline something that Gustavo Petro, who is now the President of Columbia, which is I believe the only major fossil fuel producing nation in the world so far to take action on phasing out production. But he said something to the French development agency when they asked for, you know, quote bankable Climate Solutions. He said, lives don’t matter to markets. Solving this by indebting us more to lending banks whose wealth comes from petroleum investments is obscene. And I just thought it was a really artful way to spell this out. And I think they’ve also joined the fossil Fuel Non Proliferation treaty. What do you think of this idea, of the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty? Do you think that this is going to be a movement towards finally phasing out these subsidies?

Alan: I certainly hope it is. There is going to be, and there already is in the world, there is a groundswell for getting away from fossil fuels. My country, as I alluded to earlier in this interview, has kind of been the center of the world’s economy for an awful long time, but I think because of Trump’s tariffs and other things that he’s doing, and you know, basically he’s trying to lock us in to a technology that is already outmoded, and that’s the internal combustion engine in the United States. Meanwhile, China is producing so many models of electric vehicles in all price ranges, and they have now got, you know, distance ranges that can go. I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to tell you this. In miles, you know, 400 to 600 miles per charge, they’ve got charge batteries now that charge in five minutes, which is absolutely competitive with how long it takes for any of us to fuel one of our gas guzzling cars. We’re gonna be left in the dust because economically and ecologically it makes sense. China’s also producing a gazillion solar panels, and yes, as I stated in the book, it’s still, you know, building coal fire plants. But you know, any big government has got, you know, the right hand and the left hand are oftentimes working in cross purposes, but solar energy right now if we distributed it across the rooftops of the planet, could easily cover all of our energy needs. But you know, realistically speaking, a lot of energy, I mean is centralized. I mean, that’s why these, they’re so powerful. That’s why they get these, you know, these huge subsidies. So, I show in the book a couple of potential centralized utilities that could, okay they’ll still have the power that we’ll have to buy it from them, but at least they can make it without any carbon emissions. One of them is fusion, which is really, really on the cusp of happening. I’ve been following this a lot and I have a very exciting chapter about a breakthrough at MIT that’s spun off into a for-profit company, which fortunately is now apart from all the federal funding cycles and it’s raised billions of dollars in venture capital and IT and other companies in Germany and elsewhere look like they’re going to be able to make fusion produce more energy than it cost to create fusion. Another one is an advanced form of geothermal, which basically means tapping the energy that is right below your feet, wherever you are on the planet. If you can only dig down to where it’s, you know, you hit the heat of the Earth’s mantle. The obstacle has always been that drilling tools, you know, tend to melt down, melt themselves if they get that close, but borrowing from fusion technology, which uses some very, very specialized, high powered lasers, they’ve discovered that they can bore right down through the rock, and it even creates sort of a glass envelope around it that means you don’t need to put down miles of steel casing. So, as we speak, there’s a project right now that’s in pilot form in Houston, Texas. Between these and solar, we can do this. We don’t need fossil fuels anymore.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And you do outline these technologies in the book. I do want to impress upon listeners that there is a lot in this book that doesn’t have to do with technology, strictly speaking, you visited the vast Sundarbans mangrove in Bangladesh for this book, and I was astonished to read that the tallest mangrove species there reach 80 feet high. And I just want to let that sink in for listeners, 80 feet of protection from coastal erosion. Can you describe to us what you saw there and the revelations you gleaned from that section of the book?

Alan: So the Sundarbans, which are on the coast, on the Bay of Bengal, along the Bangladeshi and Indian border, were formed by silt coming down from tributaries of the Ganges, which is called the Padma in Bangladesh. It’s the biggest mangrove forest on Earth, and it’s also the biggest sanctuary for Bengal Tigers. You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in mangroves in Central America and Mexico and Florida. And you see just a few species. You see red mangroves; you see black mangroves. There are 26 different species in the Sundarbans. It’s pretty fabulous. You get, you see wildlife down there. I was in a boat most of the time. And there’s monitor lizards and there’s all kinds of different alligators and crocodiles and it’s really to me, one of the most sacred places on Earth. But I want to stress that I was there with a researcher from the University of Chittagong, in Bangladesh, who later on took me to an example of energy that is not high tech. It was in–one of the greatest solutions that I found in this book was in one of the most destitute, awful places on Earth, and that was in a Rohingya refugee camp where you’ve got these huts that have been set up by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, and most of ’em are wrapped in black plastic and it’s stifling hot inside, except, this one sector. Where each one of these huts had a little solar panel on top of it, and there were these little antenna and bamboo rods outside that had a little transmitter on them. And what it was this was developed by a company in Dakha, Bangladesh. Each one of these huts had inside thanks to the solar panel, a functioning, electric fan, couple of lights, places where they could plug in cell phones to recharge and a battery attached to a box that would allow them by pushing one of two buttons to either share excess energy that they had in their batteries at the end of the day with their neighbors. Or buy from their neighbors, all via a wireless Wi-Fi network that connected them to a surrounding cluster of huts. And each cluster of huts in turn was connected to another cluster of huts. This was a wireless network, peer-to-peer sharing of energy that could move into hundreds or even millions of homes, all without expensive overhead, transmission lines, and the same company is now outfitting over 3 million electric rickshaws in Bangladesh, which go at night to recharge their batteries in charging stations that now are increasingly solar powered and any energy that’s left in those rickshaws gets pushed into the grid. It’s…these are just marvelous, very low tech solutions involving nothing that we don’t already know how to do. Just simply the will to do it. And luckily, they’re cost effective. They’re really cheap. So that will is growing.

Mike: I was really inspired by that entire section of the book. However, my favorite chapter is probably the last one, and I’ve really gotta hand it to you because you stick the landing on this book with this chapter, it’s…I don’t want to give anything away, but I do want to say that you posit, that the reason that society isn’t changing to face up to the problems of our time is because the people in power who profit off these problems, simply don’t want to give up that power. And I think it’s clear to me at least it is. That’s exactly what is required. So, I was wondering if you had any meditations on this since publication. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Alan: Power is probably the most addictive drug of all. People, when they get it, don’t easily relinquish it. They even access it in mechanical ways. If they don’t feel that they have it themselves, they buy a gun. Instantly, they feel that they’re more powerful. All of us want agency in our lives. We want power over our lives and people who get power over other people. You know, it’s kind of an electronic feudal system that we live in now. It’s all a bunch of principalities, billionaires, and some of them are benevolent princes and some of them are dark princes. But, yes, power can really, really be a negative force. If it becomes the goal in itself wanting more and more power, history gives us some hopeful examples. You know, towards the end of the book, I’ve got someone who is sitting, a top the remains of a temple in Uruk, which was the first city on Earth. It was founded by the Sumerians, the ones who came out of that cradle of civilization in what today is southern Iraq at the top of the Persian Gulf, and their city, inwhich the wheel was invented, in which writing was invented. And by the way, writing was invented, not because they became literary overnight, but because there was so much commerce coming up and down the Euphrates River that they needed to develop a system of accounting. But that system of accounting later was followed by literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes one of the leaders of Uruk. This is a city that existed for 5,000 years. It was still a city after Jesus Christ, and it only shifted, it only ended, because the environment shifted on it. The Euphrates River built up so much silt that it pushed itself away many kilometers, and the city is now high and dry. And throughout history, we see other cultures like the Mayan culture in Central America or the Romans who just… An ecological shift in fortune changed everything for them. Today we are the ones who are creating, we are a force of nature itself, and we are creating that ecological shift and, even though my country has been on the forefront of being responsible for so much of this, we also have Indigenous cultures in this country, such as the Ojibwe that I portrayed, who are ever resilient. And even in that chapter about Enbridge, you see the Ojibwe still coming up with some wonderful ways to move forward. The Indigenous peoples of this country who have developed such an environmental consciousness, the truth is they didn’t get it because somehow, genetically, they were more enlightened, more visionary than all the rest of us. No. They made mistakes like everybody else. As I described in my book, The World Without Us. When the first humans came to North America, there were not just 60 species. There were 60 genera of species that weighed over a ton, three times more than Africa has today. And yet they came with technology being spearpoints addle addles, hatchets things that those animals had never seen, unlike the African animals who evolved along alongside human beings and given some climate change that concentrated a lot of those big species along rivers. Within a thousand years, they had extinguished most of them, and then they realized, oh, you know, we still have these bison here, maybe we better be careful. And that’s how they learned how to be environmentally conscious. I hope that we’ve done enough damage already on this planet that we are learning the hard way, and now, you know Trump, was purchased by the oil companies, the Heritage Foundation that came up with its plan 2025, that was all funded by the Koch Brothers Oil money, we hope that this is the last gasp of an oil company, of an oil regime. That was really, if you think of it, it’s only 150 years old. It’s not like we are overthrowing thousands of years of human culture. We can shift out of this one, we can turn on a dime. We can use all the solar collectors, the natural ones that nature grows for us, and the ones that we have learned how to create, and recycle, by the way, and this is a turning point that we are all looking for.

Mike: I want to end briefly with a quote from Michael Greenberg from Climate Defiance, and he said, ‘you need to stubbornly believe that there might be a path forward that your actions can have real consequences. Not having hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Alan, what do you think of Michael’s words?

Alan: He is one of the people I portray in this book because like everyone else, you know, they would say things to the effect of, you know, if we don’t try, then failure is assured. You know, as long as we keep moving forward, as long as we keep trying, as long as we’re willing to fail in the process until we succeed at something, then hope is still alive as long as we keep hoping. You know, some of the people in this book, they really, like I said before, they’re not waiting around for miracles. They’re out there trying to make them. And there are a couple bonafide miracles in this book and I started this book because I was really, really, really, really depressed about how I saw systems breaking down under the pressure that my own species, which, you know, I love my species, we’ve created a lot of beauty, but you know, we’ve become so numerous and our impact has become so powerful, we’ve become kind of too much of a good thing. I was worried that there was no way that we were going to be over able to overcome the relentlessness of our…the pressures that we put on the rest of the planet. But by the end of this book, I was so uplifted by all these people and by the variety of people that I found in the most extraordinarily different circumstances, each of them daring to hope and oftentimes succeeding. I’m there with them. This ain’t over.

Mike: Alan, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and congratulations and well done.

Alan: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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