You asked for topic updates so we deliver. Bird populations are not doing well in North America and researchers are shocked at how effective it is to connect the dots. Tropical storms in Texas remind us of the economic paradoxes we've placed ourselves in. In addition, we reflect on Friday's climate strike from New York and Boston and start tackling the looming question in all of our minds over the climate crisis, "What now?"
Subscribe now on: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify | RSS | or search "Ashes Ashes" on your favorite podcast app.
(This is an automatically generated transcript, we'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Etienne for completing this wonderful transcript!
[0:05] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:07] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:09] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky… the end of the world.
[0:19] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:36] You are listening to AA 24/7 News. In other news, 30 million Americans have declared medical bankruptcy and have been forced to sell their few remaining cancer medications on the black market. Over to you, Dan.
[0:46] That's right, David, we’ve got a couple updates. David, a long time ago, back in the good old days of Ashes Ashes, we thought that every-- what was it, like 2 months? -- or every 12 shows, I think it was, something like that, we would do an update show where we reviewed some of the articles, or research, or new events that have transpired that relate to topics that we had done in the past. And we kept that up, twice, and then we kind of forgot about it. And then we started doing these chat shows, and a couple of our listeners were like, “Man! I really wish Daniel and David would bring back the update show, or maybe incorporate that into their chat show.” And I realized, “oh yeah, we forgot about that!” So I pulled up an article or two before we start the chat--or this could be part of the chat-- but just to remind us of the fact that there are new events in the world coming out that hopefully will show that a better world has occurred. Or the world is improving since the last time we covered the topic, but often it's the other way around.
[1:51] You have such a way with words, Daniel. So why don't you fill us in with exactly what news you're talking about here Daniel. I feel like you're itching to tell us something and this is all an excuse for you to have a lead into whatever story you actually want to discuss.
[2:06] This is not so much of a story as it is terrible news. So we did an episode on the 6th mass extinction, Episode 34, “Irreplaceable,” and we really only covered land creatures and such a small part of the 6th extinction in that episode, but one of the things we discussed were the bird populations, David, and I know birds have a special place in your heart. And they do in mine as well, and I'm learning since I'm up here in Massachusetts, I've actually met a couple birders, and I've just been blown away by what they can do. I've been on a couple trail walks with a birder and they'll look up and they’ll immediately identify a bird or they’ll hear a sound or a bird call, and they’ll know exactly what it is. And the most amazing thing I've seen are birders who can use their own mouths to mimic a bird's call and actually attract hordes of birds to nearby trees. Something I never thought was possible. This guy, you literally looked up, he said, “Oh, see those birds over there? Let me get them closer.” He did a little whistle and then like 10 birds just flocked to our tree. I was like, “what is going?! That's awesome!”
[3:20] What's that sound like? Can you do the whistle?
[3:25] He was like… [whistles unconvincingly]
[3:28] [chuckling] It's extremely convincing. I’m being attacked by birds right now.
[3:33] Well, the bad news is birds are disappearing off [laughter]--
[3:41] That's quite the segue, Daniel.
[3:43] [laughter] A new paper came out September 19th, just a week ago. And what these researchers did is they looked at bird populations on the North American continent all the way back from 1970. And they combined, in this very innovative approach, data sets from different sources. They used formal citizen science bird watching data between 2006 to 2015 and they combined that with bird watching records since 1970 and they even had radar to help with this. [4:15] And what they discovered, David, is that over the past 50 years, 3 billion birds have been lost in both the United States and Canada. Which is a whopping 29% decline.
[4:28] You said the survey data started in the 1970s.
[4:33] Not from these researchers specifically, but they pulled from data as early as 1970, yeah.
[4:39] I think it's worth noting too because this is a 30% drop in bird populations, more or less, what you're saying in the past 50 years, but 1970s, I think it's an important decade in terms of bird populations because 1972 saw that DDT ban, right? And that DDT was heavily impacting bird populations by damaging shells, preventing birds from hatching properly. So this data set is already beginning with the tail end of a bird apocalypse. So the bird populations that it’s starting with are already much, much lower than they should be. And if we're seeing a 30% drop from that, which most people consider the single worst event in terms of bird populations in recent history, because it's a single event we can point to and say that's what happened. If we’re 30% down from this-- the tail end of that bird apocalypse-- then we are really in bad shape.
[5:40] Yeah. Well, and it also again reinforces this idea that we don't really understand the pace of change, because we only really know what we grew up with. And I’m in awe of these birders who walk down the trails and identify all these birds and I’m equal parts inspired and equal parts saddened because I see the passion they have and I wonder… what would this passion look like a hundred years ago? How many more birds would they have to identify? Because these declines have occurred in every single type of species with a very few exceptions and almost every single breeding habitat except for wetlands which saw a modest increase in bird populations. And to your point about DDT, pesticides and modern agriculture, big surprise but grasslands-- where modern agriculture is most pronounced-- is where the greatest decline of bird populations occurred: a greater than 50% decline.
[6:38] So in these areas that we're repurposing for the survival of our own species and civilization we’re causing a 50% decline in populations of birds.
[6:50] In areas where we are conducting agriculture-- or industrial agriculture-- yeah.
[6:56] Do they in this paper discuss their theories on why this is happening? Do they just say it's pesticides or they say it’s buildings or windmills or lights? These things that typically get blamed for decreases in bird populations, or house cats? What do they attribute as the cause of this drop?
[7:14] They don't because that's not the purpose of the paper. They didn't go out to try and find the cause, they just wanted to catalog the decline. I do think, though, they allude to this agricultural piece. And maybe speculate that pesticides and the destruction of habitats through monoculture systems is a big part of this. And it makes sense, there's a lot of pesticides like we talked about in episode 52, “Killing Fields,” that impact the ability for birds to gain weight, for example, and then they can't go through with their migratory journey. So that's definitely a big piece of it.
[7:50] This fits very well into, additionally, those insect apocalypses which we’ve talked about on this show before-- I think a couple times-- and I wonder also how much of that-- this loss of this base of the food chain that many birds depend upon and the larger birds up the food chain are missing on the birds beneath it-- are also impacting these numbers. So it's a perfect storm. It's loss of habitat, it's introducing these chemicals to the environment, it's making the environment much more artificial because things like buildings, like lights do disrupt, not only migratory patterns, but also mating rituals. And then on top of that we're taking out the very bottom of this food chain. We’re making it so birds quite literally are starving to death. [8:32] This is something we should probably explore in more depth in a single episode by itself, I think that I would be an interesting thing. Maybe we can have some of your birder friends on so they actually do those whistles and we can hear what a real bird sound is supposed to be like. But this is this is not a unique story, this is a story that keeps getting repeated over and over again and every single environment, in every ecosystem. Just this sheer decimation that our modern way of living, of sustaining our level of life, is just reeking pure havoc on all the other natural creatures of this Earth. And if we want to continue living on this Earth, a Earth that we depend upon, ecosystems that we depend upon, an environment that we depend upon, then we’re going to have to, at some point, come to this reckoning that our way of living is unsustainable. Even beyond the carbon damage that we do with our greenhouse gas emissions, just the very nature that we interact with the environment, with the ecology on its whole, is not sustainable. These conversations can't just end at, “oh, we'll transition to renewables. Oh, we'll introduce carbon credits.” Whatever it is. [9:36] If that's the limit of our conversation, we're still doomed at this point, because we're not just causing this damage through climate change, through global warming-- though that is a major part of this thing-- but we're also just ripping the rug under these ecosystems in every possible way and level. And this is a topic I want explore a little bit more later on in this episode, because I do want to talk about the climate marches that happened the other day and again will happen later this week on Friday right after this episode airs, and these topics are fresh on my mind.
[10:07] And then another piece of this is something that Bernie Krause talked about in episode 44. That the failing of the scientific community is the way that research is siloed off, and the variables that we look into the environment, we treat it with isolation. And he was referring to species specifically, how we only look at individual species without considering the ecological system as a whole, and this is a perfect example of this. Here's what the researchers said: “’this approach of combining population abundance estimates across all species and looking for an overall trend is really unprecedented.’ [laughter] said Scott Loss, a conservation biologist at Oklahoma State University. ‘We were stunned by the results, it’s just staggering,’ said Kenneth Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy.” Kenneth goes on to say, “it's not just these highly threatened birds that we are afraid are going to go on the endangered species list -- it's across the board.” Now I just want to again reiterate this point that I grew up thinking, David, that the scientists of our world had all the answers, and then we grow up and we find out we live in a world where 30% of the bird population can just disappear, and researchers are like, “oh wow, we didn't notice that,” and then when they literally combine population studies and they look at the overall trend they say, “wow we never tried this before.” It’s mind-boggling to me.
[11:36] The very same thing happened with that study on the insect apocalypse where they took all this data that all these separate researchers had collected and then a lot of citizen scientists-- people who are professional scientist, who just catalog these things in their own spare time, which a lot of birders are doing also with bird populations-- when they added up all this data that was already there, they said, “oh my God!” We’re in the middle of not just a mass extinction but a mass extermination right now. And how can you lose 25 to 50% of a population of an entire class of living things without realizing it's happening! People are so narrowed off into their tiny little niche--their little silo of data-- that we’re missing out on these huge massive pictures that just paint these images of destruction. And I think that’s a really good point, we need more this collaboration, we need more of these big picture studies. But increasingly there is pushes not to do this. The funding that would fund these things is increasingly hard to find as countries don't want to find out this information as private industries don't want this kind of data published. And so they're fighting against these market forces that are trying not to let the information out of this Pandora's box but the damage is done; and whether we realize it's done or not, whether we can quantify it or not, the reality is we're going to have to live with the consequences either way.
[12:58] And to be clear, we're not blaming the scientists themselves necessarily but it's really these systems that encourages research to match the funding demand of what is increasingly corporate interest and we talk about universities specifically in an episode on the topic at episode 75 “Business School”. But you're absolutely right, it's funding problems, it's the way we organize research universities in the first place that then kind of forces scientist to go down these very narrow siloes. Or at least there's no infrastructure to connect the dots from this very important, really detailed research. But why don't we go on to one more update, David.
[13:39] Well, you did mention the word infrastructure there. I think we can seize that.
[13:43] Can we seize it or will it “sea-rise” us? [chuckling] Okay, update number 2, we talked about sea level rise in Episode 2, “Concrete Reef,” of course we've eluded back to that many times, but in Texas just last—wait, did that paper come out the same day or is that a coincidence? Okay, well, now in Houston last week, on the same day that that paper came out, David-- September 19th-- a tropical storm dumped more water on Texas than it had seen since Hurricane Harvey. And this is being described as one of the worst freshwater floods in US history. And so many towns in Houston and the surrounding area have still not recovered from Hurricane Harvey that occurred in 2017, which dumps just unprecedented amounts of water on the city. And this storm that occurred last week, it didn't hit Houston as bad as the other areas like Beaumont, which experienced 42 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. And for many people this was way worse than what they experienced from Hurricane Harvey, because of where they were located. But even in Houston, from Tropical Storm Imelda, where the worst of this was avoided, up to 4 inches of rain fell per hour, and at least one roof collapsed on a building. And David, do you remember-- it was several shows ago, I think it was a chat show-- I told you about what happened to me in Washington DC?
[15:16] Yeah, why don't you share with everyone, Daniel?
[15:18] I think this was in July. I was in DC, and I just want to provide some perspective on what it means to get 4 inches of rain every hour, or 42 inches of rain in a day. I was leaving Washington DC on a Monday, I called an Uber, and then [laughter] the city got 3.3 inches of rain in under an hour. It was one of the worst rain dumps and flash flooding the city has ever experienced in its entire history. And I was in my Uber car, the water raised so quickly that our car was flooded and we had to climb out the window and push the car in water that came out to our waist. That's just a crazy amount of water and crazy amount of flooding. So you can-- just for comparison's sake-- 42 inches… 10 times that amount! And as you'd expect this had an impact on infrastructure, but I specifically want to highlight energy infrastructure, David.
[16:15] A favorite topic of ours.
[16:17] Because of the severity of the storm, ExxonMobil had to shut down a large oil refinery in Beaumont producing some 370,000 barrels of oil per day, in addition to a chemical plant right next to the oil refinery. And that was not enough. [16:37] A oil pipeline-- TC Energy Corps’ Marketlink Pipeline-- that delivers oil from Texas to Oklahoma, had to be shut down, halting the flow of 750,000 barrels of crude oil. Which is a pretty large chunk of change, considering total US crude oil output in the Gulf is around some two million barrels per day, and the Gulf is itself the source of 16% of all US crude oil output. Which is really funny, because at the same time that I heard this on the news, just earlier that day, I had been daydreaming about climate change, and what if climate change had a conscience and just all the hurricanes just impacted the oil companies. Or all the storms just somehow were able to just flood our oil companies, or the homes of oil CEOs, that type of thing. [17:27] And then I heard this on the news, I said, “wow, that's interesting.”
[17:30] Well, Earth is having a conscience and doing this consciously or is it some benevolent force using weather control technology to do just that. Whether the “deep state” of the United States is trying to fight other factions of the “deep state” using HAARP and other weather control stations or benevolent aliens who have come to visit us and are steering hurricanes in the places where they can do the most infrastructure damage-- who's to say, Daniel!? But I think it is interesting timing considering the fact that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia just saw that large attack on their refinery infrastructure, and we're seeing these global jumps in oil prices because of that. It’s good timing for the Earth. It's bad timing for global economies, but that's always good for the Earth.
[18:15] Well, you just mentioned global economy. This is something we talked about in that episode, “Concrete Reef”--our second show-- about these flooding that always occur in these areas. Houston gets a lot of flooding, and so a lot of people who live in these areas along the Gulf expect it. But then there's an interesting thing that occurs in the rest of the nation and the discourse around what to do when all this devastation hits, and you hear a lot of rhetoric coming from people saying, “look, it's terrible and it's sad that people's homes get flooded and all that but at the end of the day, they chose to live there and they should have known that this is a flood-prone area, and it's not our fault that they can't afford insurance, and so they just need to figure it out and if they don't like it, they can move somewhere else.” [19:02] But the fact of the storm shut down 73% of Gulf oil production, I think starts to reveal the paradox here, or the Catch-22, if you will, which is that the US economy depends on this area for its natural resources and its oil output and the effect that has on the economy. But you can't have that industry unless there are people there. People there to work in those refineries. And then you can't have those people there without homes and services for them; you can't have labor without schools for their children, and if you’re going to have schools for children you better have some ice cream shops, right? So again it's this Catch-22, and our historical response has been to place all the risk on the people. We don't allow them to purchase insurance at an affordable rate to prevent them losing their life savings when their home gets flooded. We say, “well, it's too big of a risk and it's all on you.” But then we subsidize and protect the corporations and their profits which come directly from those people and the very fact that they're vulnerable in the first place.
[20:10] So in a sense, our very dependence upon this natural resource-- this oil--refined into fossil fuels that we use for all sorts of bits of our daily life, whether it's powering electricity, or transportation, or flying all around the world-- whatever it is that we're doing with this-- we're forcing, essentially, some people to live in these environmentally fragile areas because they need to support the systems that support the rest of our ways of life. But increasingly, because that we've chosen to live our lives with this fossil fuel behemoth hovering over our heads, making everything around us get worse and worse, we put these people who enable this system-- that enable our high standard of living-- to have to stand and survive directly in harm's way. Increasingly, with these thousand year floods happening now every couple of years, instead of every thousand years like they're supposed to, and we have national systems that are supposed to support them in these cases: FEMA, national flood insurance, all this kind of stuff. But how long are we going to continue rebuilding these communities, rebuilding these lives, when they are constantly in harm's way? [21:22]. But we can't exactly force them to move somewhere else like you’re mentioning, Daniel, because then our very own infrastructure that enables our way of life-- of those of us who aren't living in harm's way-- to sustain itself is dependent upon them to sacrifice their lives, essentially, for us. And this is a very specific, tiny microcosm of the systems that enable our way of life around the world. So this is all occurring within the United States, yes, but these same relationships exist all around the world, whether it's manufacturing goods in China, or Indonesia, or in other places. Whether it's enabling the removal of minerals or fossil fuels in Africa, in the Middle East, and the suffering that these supply chains promote around the world. We're exporting all of this violence, all of this exploitation, to all the far corners of the world, forcing people to live in harm’s way and to sacrifice their way of life in order to sustain those of us at the global core to live the highest standard of living that humans probably ever had in human history.
[22:23] At what cost is another conversation, and the things that we’ve given up to do this, even those of us within this civilization core, is debatable, but it's important to remember every time we do make a choice to do something, whether it is fly, whether it is to get fresh fruit that shouldn't exist in our part of the world, that had to be imported from Chile or something. When we buy a shirt that cost $2 or $3-- a price that shouldn't even really be possible-- to understand that this is enabled by a trail of blood and suffering, a trail that is constantly made worse by the actions of those of us benefiting from the process. And I know I'm getting a little bit angry here, Daniel, so let me calm it down for a second, but it is important remember. We can’t just look at that place is like this and say “well, it’s their own fault that they chose to live there.” Because no one really chooses to live anywhere. You're born into a situation, and then maybe you can move somewhere else me, maybe you can’t. That’s not part of the conversation, but somebody has to be there, and somebody has to be there because somebody needs to be there to support your way of life. [23:29] My way of life; our way of life. And the only way to free people from being in this alley of destruction is by accepting the fact that our way of life is unsustainable, and we need to give things up to make sure that others don't have to suffer to sustain it.
[23:47] We talk about individual responsibility versus corporate and governmental and broader institutional responsibility, and it's always hard for people to hear they have to give something up, but again we were talking about systems change, that's what’s ultimately needed, so one thing that is encouraging is that our individual choices are made so much easier when the systems underneath our lives support the choices that we want to make. Right now it's very difficult to give up shopping for clothes at a cheap brand because maybe there aren't very easy alternatives, right? But if we all collectively support the dismantling of exploitative and discriminatory and very slave-like business practices, then we won't even have the choice to purchase in the same manner, and other options will present themselves that will make it easier for us to enjoy a life that's also in harmony with the Earth and the people around us. And again, that's just something to remember. It's like, it's so difficult to change your diet, but when there's a fast food joint on the right side of the road on your way home from your daily commute, it's really hard to resist that. But if you all of a sudden wake up one day, and you find that that fast food joint disappeared, most people don't even notice, they just go about their day and their habits change without them even really having to consciously make that decision. And that's what we all should support: collectively changing the system around us to support healthier, better, more sustainable and more loving, healthy-- and all these buzzwords-- the systems that support those choices.
[25:28] Yeah, exactly. It’s really a give-and-take, and the people who say, “it's all independent choices, individuals that have to make the difference” – that's half true. The people who say, “71% of carbon emissions are all from groups of small companies” – well, that's also half true. Technically, yeah, but those companies are creating those products to serve people who are buying those products. And so it's a give-and-take: our individual choices impact the choices these larger structural parts of society make. And so we really need to both deny certain sets of choices from us so that we’re not tempted-- like you say, Daniel, -- to engage in them. Imagine if we grounded flights for example. Now suddenly we don't have the option of making this bad choice. We’re not forced into weighing, “is this worth me getting somewhere that I would like to go or maybe even need to go?” and the destruction and suffering it’ll ultimately cause by making that choice. Yeah, we can offset them with carbon credits, but by the way, those ones that you buy from most companies and from the airlines themselves are dramatically underpricing it, and it's just a way to make you feel better, it’s not really doing anything. [26:34] But it's a give-and-take and so you really have to have not just a individual change, not just a change in terms of the way corporations and governments interact, but cultural change, societal change-- all this has to happen at once and together in a cooperative manner for anything to happen. And we can force those changes as individuals, collectively, we can force those changes as governments laying down rules and regulations, but it's never going to come from the corporations -- that is one thing that we can be certain of. If the change is going to happen, it's going to have to ultimately happen because of the will of the people, either acting in mass individually or collectively in a concentration.
[27:16] Speaking of people acting collectively, David, I think there was a recent event where many people got together to use our collective voices to call on systems change -- a particular type of system change.
[27:30] Yeah, this is a week of climate action, Daniel. There's all sorts of events happening around the world. Many people saw on the news last Friday, right before this episode aired, September 20th 2019, this was a global day of climate strike. So this is especially in the youth: high schools, middle schools, elementary schools around the world in many major cities agreed to let students off for the day if they would attend the global climate protest centered primarily around here in New York City where Greta Thunberg spoke to a mass crowd of people before her speech the following days at the UN during the Climate Summit this week. I was there for the marches here along with almost 300,000 other New Yorkers and people from around the world who came here to attend these things-- for better or for worse and their climate emissions-- and it was a great event. I saw so many kids who are just angry about the future, I saw so many people who had some really great signs expressing their anger, their discomfort. The streets were entirely filled; there were lots of flags, lots of XR stuff. I was there with a contingent of some of the groups that I organize with, and it was exciting to see people turn out for the climate, which is something that we don't usually see. But at the same time it left me wanting a lot more, and I'll talk about that in a moment, but I know you were also able to attend some of these actions on that day, Daniel.
[28:49] Yes, I did. I don't have much report. I took the train down to Boston… there were a bunch of students on the train. Got there, and there were a bunch of people there, I estimate about 10 million and--
[29:01] The actual-- I think-- amount in Boston was 10,000 people attending that particular protest.
[29:08] Well, it certainly felt like a big number. And I actually—David—got to meet up with a listener of the show, met with them for the first time. They are part of the XR movement here in Boston, and they happen to have an extra ticket to see “Koyaanisqatsi” live, performed by Philip Glass…
[29:25] I'm jealous, I wish I was--
[29:26] …that night. Yeah. The perks, David, of knowing people.
[29:30] Yeah. Like I said, I really wish I was there, and there are-- this is not the end of the climate events that are happening-- there is another climate strike on this Friday that will probably be much more radical than the one that was the Youth Strike on the previous Friday. Here in New York, there's a lot of radical actions planned. I will probably be attending these in a support function as a medic, though I’m not going to run as a marked medic, because I don’t have a buddy right now, but this will be a much more dramatic acting day, I hope, because unfortunately a lot of what I felt on Friday was that we were in a parade more than a protest. I don’t know if you got that sense there, Daniel. And don’t get me wrong, they were lots of chanting, lots of shouting. People were shouting angry things, lots of “eat the rich,” “kill the rich,” “fuck people who destroyed the Earth,” but there wasn't a lot of anger so much as there was exuberance of being able to walk down these streets that’d be normally dominated by cars, in this city.
[30:28] As somebody who has protested a decent amount of this city, I was shocked at how little police presence there was for this particular event. Normally, when you have an event that is even moderately radical, NYPD likes to respond with an overwhelming show of force. They bring up paddy wagons, they bring up huge amounts of police, they bring up bike battalions, motorcycle battalions, the LRAD cars are always just there so you can see them, they’re yelling at you to stay on the sidewalk. Every single police officer has, like, 10 zip ties hooked on their side, they have riot police ready to go. The idea of all this is just to intimidate you, and let you know who runs this town and that if you want to step off, you're going to end up spending at least a couple hours in processing. They'll probably let you go, but they’re going to make it miserable in that process.
[31:11] But for this climate march, probably because it had so much media attention, probably because it was semi-sanctioned by the city-- by the agreement to release so many school children to attend this march specifically-- I think NYPD had the good sense that it wouldn't be a good look for them to be heavy-handed in the reaction to this. So I've almost-- no cops, I saw, all along the route, except two places when we pass by Wall Street. There were so many cops guarding Wall Street, and the other place that I saw lots of cops were right across from Wall Street around the Wall Street Bull, where they had erected barricades and had a bunch of cops guarding that. Which I think is a really funny acknowledgement that this is where the anger should be directed, and the cops instead were using their presence, and the threat of violence, to instead funnel people down to the end of the street to this [Crush?] at Battery Park. [32:06] Which is basically the very bottom of Manhattan, where these speeches would eventually be occurring. Unfortunately, a lot of people after they got to this park just left, because there wasn’t a lot of room, and a lot of people didn't want to stick around a couple hours to hear Greta speak. The police were able to basically disrupt everybody's anger by being frustrated with the crowd and released them off to the subway, so nothing happened to the people who are causing a lot of this climate crisis through their investments, through their actions, through their control of capital along Wall Street, and we ended up just having, like, a weird hippie party down right on this park looking out across all this water. It felt, overall, like what this was more than anything was a release valve: “let's take away some of the anger, some of the pressure, some of the threats that people have been building up to, and see how can we dissipate this as quickly as possible.” And a parade that pretends it's a protest is a really great way to do that, and it echoed to me all these other unfortunate fails of protests that we've seen that started in the 60s with mass movements, continues through the 90s, and a lot more to this day with things like the Women's March, which it’s exciting to see that many people turn out and try and be there for women's rights, to protest certain things that they feel are unacceptable, but nothing happened from that protest. One of the largest protest in US history -- nothing happened from it. So the powers-that-be and the police departments that control these things have really figured out the way to allow this type of protest to occur. [33:30] And make sure it happens so that everybody can feel good about protesting, post their media, tell people they were there, tell people “oh yeah, I'm marching that; I'm fighting for the Earth,” when in reality nothing is accomplished, and these are lessons that we've already learned through the history of protesting: these types of mass movement, when they aren't directed in any sort of end goal that is something beyond a speech, don't really end up getting us much, unfortunately. They look really good, we love to point to them in the history books as being the reason why things happened, but often times, that's a lie to repaint history and to tell us that if these events end up in a way that they're bad enough that we have to go to the streets to protest again, “that’s the way to do it,” when in reality, it's just a way to neuter us to prevent us from actually impacting the change that we want. I think I felt some of that frustration today. Greta gave that speech, it’s a very short speech in front of the UN. There's actually a lot of young activists who were getting speeches at the UN this week, not just her. The realization that this type of PR-based protesting-- yes, it raises awareness-- but we're at a point where climate awareness has reached a critical mass, and what we need now is climate action, and not the type of action that politicians and corporate leaders are prepared to do, where they make empty pledges to reach net zero by 2050-2040, maybe even 2030 if they're especially progressive, but I'm talking actual preparations to start slashing and destroying the economy, essentially, in order to prepare us for the fact that if we don't do this right now, then we are doomed. [34:58] And increasingly the reports that are coming out through the leaked IPCC, and additional papers, are showing us that there's less and less time than we think. Everything is coming faster than expected, so even this sense of urgency that so many people feel it's not enough already, and politicians are already acting too slow. So I hope-- and I'm hoping this protest on Friday is the start of this-- that this movement, these actions that don't accomplish much of anything beyond raising awareness, aren't just pressure relief valves allowing people to say they're fighting for the Earth, but instead they’re gateway drugs. Where they step out there and they realize there's this many people that support them. That there’s this many people who are there to have their back if they end up in a fight, and let them progress this to being not just taking the streets for a couple of hours in one day, but say, “let's take these streets and stay there. Let's do some direct action, let's make a difference and let's actually fight for the Earth instead of just celebrating our concern for it.”
[35:53] To be honest with you, David, that's my optimistic view of these types of things. The one I went to in Boston, I also left it with some mixed feelings. First, I'll just start with what I liked. I did like the focus from a lot of the speakers and the explicit goals outlined by this event, which specifically call out the mistreatment of indigenous people, the theft of indigenous land, and the extraction of wealth from marginal people. I think that's such an important piece of this climate discussion, and I'm so glad to see that that was one of the main focus points of this mass movement. I hear what you're saying about it potentially being a release valve, but I also think there is something very encouraging about children and students and other activists and just people within the community becoming normalized to that as a meaningful societal goal and value. That's something -- just the fact that we're even talking about that is obviously way too late, but better late than never. [36:51] To your point about the police presence and how they treat these protests differently-- my experience was similar to yours in that I didn't get a lot of emotion from the crowd. We did a lot of marching, there was some laughing and even people would start at the chants but then they would kind of half-heartedly join in, in terms of the crowd, and then it’d kind of die off, and I just didn’t feel like there was a lot of emotion at this event, and here's what I think it is. Several months ago, I talked about on the show, I went to a protest in Atlanta that was directed at immigration control and their practice of separating families at the Border and caging children and when we marched I had tears in my eyes, and when we went to the Detention Facility there was rage in our voices, and the police responded by running their motorcycles through the crowd. [37:39] Because we had a very strong emotion, we knew exactly what we were there for, and we knew exactly what we were demanding, and I think climate change and the existential threat that we’re facing is in ways such a broad topic that it draws so many different interests. I mean, we were at this event, David, and there were politicians walking around canvassing. I was approached by a politician and 3 of their professional staff giving me a spiel about the district they represent, and how they support Medicare for all and all this and, like, “can we take your email address,” and I'm like, “what's going on?” It really did have that festival-like feeling to it. And just think about how many people can connect their interests to this broader discussion. You could be the owner of a solar panel company and you might have an interest in coming to the climate strike so that you can support a Green New Deal that might deliver more money into your pocket. [38:32] You might be a student who’s just happy to be off from school. You could be a politician like that person that talked to me. There's so many different ways to connect people's interests to this issue that I think it's hard to get that emotion, because it's not uniform across people. People don't have the same goals, and that's why it's so important what you're talking about to, to view these things as ways to draw people in to more concerted effort with goals that align with their lives, and I think you're right, that this Friday will be a more intense series of actions around the world. I know my XR friend talked about what they were doing this Friday, and I’ve seen groups like theirs discussing more direct action, affinity group models, people doing very specific things to elicit very specific consequences on the people in power, which I hope is going to be a lot more impactful. But overall I am hopeful; I think the more people get tied into this issue, like we talked about before, David, we've reached a tipping point on this Earth where it’s no longer possible to sit on the sidelines, you have to take the stand. [39:36] And for many people who have never participated in anything outside of just casting their vote, going to an event like this and just becoming normalized to the fact that people gather around an issue is a baby step in the right direction to becoming a staunch supporter on the right side of this fight. And it's so funny to me you mentioned the police protecting Wall Street as everyone walks down the street, or marches down the street, because it's so clear that our world leaders, and our corporate leaders, just have no respect for what the people are demanding, and hold us in such contempt. Case in point, so Greta did her speech at the UN, speaking to world leaders, saying, “how dare you not address the existential crisis that is facing the future of this Earth,” and just minutes after her speech, the president of the United States posted and pinned a tweet to his account that read, “she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see.” [40:38] And of course many people responded to that to say, “how can you mock a little girl,” but I think there's something broader going on, which is that this is not simply mocking Greta, this is mocking every single person who lives on this earth and wants to see a better future. To look at us and say “oh, you want a better world? Isn't that nice, I bet you're going to have a wonderful future, aren't you? Meanwhile we're not going to do a damn thing about it.” And I think it's very important that we remind ourselves that that's what we're up against. That you're absolutely right, David, that if we treat these actions and these events like a release valve-- a way to go and take a selfie and then say we did something--and just hope that change is going to come… it's not going to come! It will never come, because the people who rule this world have been doing so for so long because they are so good at ignoring what people need. In fact, putting people in desperate and vulnerable and deadly situations to benefit themselves, and unless you make them change, no change will occur.
[41:43] Yeah, without a doubt. I really hope that we’ll look back at this point and we’ll say this was the start of when things really started getting serious and people started fighting back, not just saying, “hey we should do something about this, here's our demands,” but really taking this into their own hands. Because ultimately, if we want to impact the change we need to make a measurable difference in the time that we have left, that's where it’s going to have to come from. It's going to have to be all of us collectively coming together and demanding that, and then when they don't give in to her demands, actually doing it ourselves. Because the power of everyone, whether it's States, whether it's politicians, whether it's corporations, whether it’s even billions, it all comes from individuals who are willing to work and enable those-- whether they’re institutions or individuals-- to have that power that they wield over us. Jeff Bezos as a man isn’t any stronger or smarter or more charismatic or more skilled than any other person on this planet; he just happens to have access to all this capital that allows him to basically force other people to do stuff that he wants. [42:47] But if we deny that ability and instead we do things that aren't good for a small class of billionaires, or politicians, or people who want to control us for their own best interest instead of ours, and we instead take control of our lives, with our own best interest at heart, with the best interest of those who are in the way of these climate crises, whether that’s down in places like Houston weather it's all the way around the world in Myanmar, in Bangladesh… then we can start acting collectively for our neighbors for our global partners in this process of saving the world from this crisis that is barreling down towards us.
[43:25] On our last chat show, David, you asked us to imagine a better world, and so we got a couple of responses from people writing to tell us what their better world looks like, and we'll read a couple of those as the weeks go, but for today, here’s Connor. [43:46] I want a world where there are no alarms, where we can wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. It doesn't matter what day it is, only that it is today, and that the hours inside it do not scream for our attention. Sometimes, yes there is work that needs doing, sometimes we do need to work beneath the moon and let the sun sleep in our stead, but only when we need to. When the neighbor’s crop is touched by too quick frost and won't survive the night; when the wind’s howling whimsy has tossed trees through their yard; when our neighbor has been hurt or when they have fallen sick. Because in this world I want, when our neighbor suffers, we know we need to help. [44:34] I want my neighbors to be many. I want them everywhere between my labor and my leisure. I want to talk to them and listen to them. I want to teach them and learn from them. I want to argue with them and laugh with them, and I want us all to cry and sing and dance and play. I want to die someday, and in my long night, be loved in their mourning after. Death shall be hilarious; it will come like a fright, sudden and shocking, or, it will come like a long and clever joke: building, building… until the end begins to be in sight, and then... Ah…! Sweet release. The suffering is ended and the tension scatters through the air. I die, and they laugh, happy that I'm gone; happy I was there. Happy. But in my heart, I know this won't be so, because a world without me is tragic, because I was the only one in all this world who saw why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It was the sugar.
[45:43] [laughter] That sweet release, Daniel.
[45:47] A lot to think about, David.
[45:48] But think about it, and do something about it. We hope you will, and we hope many of you are able to make it to these climate actions. Not just this Friday, but going forward, I know Earth Strike, XR -- they have events coming up over the next few weeks and months, and I'm sure there are many climate organizations in your own area that also have things and would love your support. So look for those or come and join us on our Discord. There's people from all around the world who are willing to connect you with people who are doing good work. You can find a link to that on our website, just click the community tab, “Discord,” and you can come and chat with the rest of us. It's a great chat community and we would love to have you there. And at the same time, we would also love to keep hearing your visions for a better world, as well as discussions about community or anything else you'd like to talk about us, and there are a number of ways contact us.
[46:37] We have an email address, it's [email protected]. We encourage you to send us your thoughts. We also have a phone number.
[46:47] That's right, the phone number, which we can take your voice mails to eventually build that call-in show, is 313-992-7437. That's 313-99ASHES. And if you are someone internationally that want to make that call, voice record yourself, email it to us at [email protected]. There are plenty of ways to contact us, you can find more of them on our website, as well as a full transcript of this episode, and some the links and sources we use, not just for this episode, but every single episode. It’s an incredible resource, we hope you make use of it. The URL for that is ashesashes.org. And if that's not your cup of tea, well, we're on your favorite social media network as well, posting stories, facts, questions and memes, and you can find all those at @AshesAshesCast.
[47:39] And as always a lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible. But we will never use advertising to support this show. We won't take it no matter how much money they offer us. It would have to be at least over-- I don't know-- like $500. But we won't take it.
[47:56] No, it would have to be way more, and then we would still say no.
[48:00] But is there a number?
[48:02] Well, if somebody walked in and was like, “here’s a billion dollars,” I might say, “yeah.”
[48:07] Alright, so if we ever sell out, you can stop giving us money, because this is a listener-supported show. You can support us in a number of ways. Talk about these topics with your friends and family, spread the word… I'm blanking on the other ones, but you can also send us love on patreon.com/ashesashescast, it helps us keep going, and we'll send you a sticker every couple months. We would like to thank our associate producers John Fitzgerald and Chad Peterson: thank you so much! Over to you, David.
[48:39] Yep, as always that's a lot of information to cram in here, but we hope you'll consider it all. Check all those sources out and then tune in next week where we have another deep dive episode where we're going to really explore a topic we think is really important and we hope you'll learn a lot from. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
[48:58] Bye.
[48:59] Goodbye.