coe197_cbc-special_POLISHED.mp3 NOTES [00:10:16] Moved 'Yeah I think that's great' to Leah's speech. [00:22:44] "And you really think about...that's so funny" was all attributed to Bina, split to be with correct speakers TRANSCRIPT Dominic Boyer: [00:00:24] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures Energy podcast, this is Dominic Boyer here with Cymene Howe: [00:00:29] Cymene Howe Dominic Boyer: [00:00:30] We are your normal co-hosts for this podcast. Cymene Howe: [00:00:34] Well, just because the way I said my name sound like when you, you know, when you have to record your name for your outgoing voicemail message, they're like, Say your name, Cymene Howe... Dominic Boyer: [00:00:45] Beep. Sorry... Cymene Howe: [00:00:46] It's like that, right? Anyhow, yeah, that's it. So we are the, oh, the normal. The usual sounds Dominic Boyer: [00:00:52] Better. We are the usual suspects. We are not the suspects. This week we have a rare week off and today we are giving over the sacred bandwidth of the Cultures of Energy podcast to our friend Leah Stokes from UC Santa Barbara, who is speaking with Bina Venkataraman about her fabulous new book, The Optimiste Telescope Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. I just listen to this podcast. It is really, really good. You're going to really enjoy it, and I think we're well on our way to planned obsolescence where younger, feistier people take over the podcast from us. Cymene Howe: [00:01:26] All right. Ok. Dominic Boyer: [00:01:27] For those of you who might be new here because you're following Bina and Leah and not us, we just wanted to very briefly recap what this podcast is all about. In case you want to, as we hope you will go back and listen to some of our other episodes. Cymene Howe: [00:01:39] Well, we have a deep catalog at this point, almost 200 episodes. And as you saw when you clicked or when you if you were listening to Dominic just a minute ago, it's called the Cultures of Energy podcast. But it is not only energy. On this podcast we do everything Anthropocene, everything enviro, eco, anything having to do with climate change and all the dynamics surrounding that. We talk to academic people like people in anthropology and sociology and political science and literature and philosophy. But we also talked to a number of activists. We talked to a bunch of artists and even even some climate scientists, every once in a while... Dominic Boyer: [00:02:22] They get roped in and sometimes they... Cymene Howe: [00:02:23] Get there. But so we would encourage you to go look at the back catalogue and see some interesting people. And we spend about 45 minutes to an hour with each of them and a kind of free wheeling conversation what we think of as a smart dinner party conversation with people who you want to hang out with. So go check it out and give it a sample and see if you like what you hear. And if you do, then please come back and we can be part of your ear world. Dominic Boyer: [00:02:49] Yeah, and we got this podcast started about three years ago because we thought it's important to get more people from the arts, the humanities and social sciences into conversations about our climate futures today or our climate emergencies and futures, we might say. And so that's kind of why the podcast has the particular angle it does, but it's grown over time. And if you like listening to occasional us, try to insert occasional moments of levity into what are often very complicated and sometimes, you know, heavy topics. We try to do that in our interest segments, and I'm going to give you an example of that right now... Cymene Howe: [00:03:25] OK? Dominic Boyer: [00:03:25] We saw this movie Ad Astra this week... Cymene Howe: [00:03:27] Right? Dominic Boyer: [00:03:28] And I'm going to do my Brad Pitt impression. Cymene Howe: [00:03:30] That's Brad Pitt. Well, but they can't see it, so they can't see how much I look a lot like exactly pretty much like like twins. Yeah, go ahead. Dominic Boyer: [00:03:38] We are devourers of worlds. And when I say we, I mean, mostly white men who don't like their dads, I don't like my dad, and I'm going to make you watch a two hour long space opera where I track him down to the ends of the Solar System just to apologize to him before I throw him into Neptune or before he abandons me one more time. This is Brad Pitt. It's pretty much that capsule. Pretty much Cymene Howe: [00:04:06] For you. Ok. I mean, that was a pretty good synopsis of the film, but that didn't sound... Dominic Boyer: [00:04:11] Spoiler alert. Cymene Howe: [00:04:11] That didn't sound like Brad Pitt at all, did I? Dominic Boyer: [00:04:16] Yeah. Did I not make it so I could Cymene Howe: [00:04:19] Make something that was a little too low or something? But yeah, so yeah, Ad Astra was definitely... Dominic Boyer: [00:04:25] Yeah, we do. We do movie reviews. Sometimes we do. We do Anthropocene Movie reviews sometimes too Cymene Howe: [00:04:29] On rare occasion. Yeah, on rare occasions. That's yeah, that's that's another little thing. Dominic Boyer: [00:04:34] Ok, so folks, listen on, enjoy Leah and Bina's conversation, which is great and come back and listen to us again sometime. Cymene Howe: [00:04:43] OK? And with that we say, Go Climate Book Club special. Woo-hoo. Leah Stokes: [00:05:07] So today we're taking over the Cultures of Energy podcast. My name is Leah Stokes and I'm an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I have a book club on Twitter called the hashtag Climate Book Club. And our third book pick is a book called The Optimist Telescope. Thinking ahead in a reckless age, and I am very lucky to be joined today by the author of the book, Bina Venkatraman. And thank you so much for being here, Bina. Bina Venkatraman: [00:05:37] Thank you so much for having me, Leah. It's a delight. Leah Stokes: [00:05:41] Oh, I feel the same way. So I wanted to start out by just asking you, why did you decide to write a book? I understand you were working before you wrote this book in the Obama administration. I'd love to hear a little bit about what your experience was like working there, and you know some of your background working on climate and why you decided to write a book about sort of time and how we think about the problems in the future? Bina Venkatraman: [00:06:05] Sure. So when I was in the Obama White House, my job part of my job, was talking to companies and trying to help them prepare for a future of climate impacts, including droughts, wildfires, floods, extreme weather events in general. And so I would sit with company executives from all kinds of different sectors and talk to them about the climate projections and what they could expect in the sector or in the region where they worked, how their supply chains might be affected, how it might affect their workforces or their bottom line. But so often I found people even with good intentions. So there was one food company executive in particular who I really just remember because the interaction stuck with me who said I have children and grandchildren and children. I'm really concerned about climate change. This all makes sense to me that I should orient my company to prepare for these threats. But my board and shareholders are just holding me responsible for what I do in the next quarter. It's just not possible for me to think ahead. And so these kinds of interactions, even if they were more implicit and not explicitly stated, sort of like, that's really nice, but sorry, I've got a quarterly number to meet, young lady. They kind of, you know, they led to some frustration. I thought I was failing at my job, and I remember talking to a friend about it one day who said, Well, you know, people, people just can't think ahead. You know, we're just myopic creatures. And when I ultimately left government, having had some successful work, I will say just by just by these frustrations on the climate crisis, I started to really question that basic assumption, that idea that people are just not capable of thinking ahead. Bina Venkatraman: [00:07:43] And the journalist in me, I was formerly a journalist and soon to be one again just couldn't accept this to be a truth without having examined it more from a scientific perspective. From a cultural perspective. And just in general. And and what I uncovered in sort of five to six years of researching this question from all different angles, from the fields of psychology, economics, biology, anthropology, but also traveling around the world and talking to people studying situations where communities come together and they exercise incredible foresight about the future or individuals do it. I really came to see this as a dangerous misconception that it's the curse of human nature or that it's the curse of capital markets. The shareholders just won't let you think ahead, or that it's the curse of human societies, right? We're just going. We're we're just bound to self-immolate, and here we are on the verge of disaster. In fact, there are a number of ways in which we can aid our foresight and we have to understand what it is about our environment, what it is about the conditions we're in, what it is about the choices we have in our society today, the choices we have in our lives that we can actually pull some of those levers and be better able to think ahead. And I also feel like this is sort of a unique human talent. If you look at the at the research, it's sort of what we evolved to do to think ahead. Bina Venkatraman: [00:09:02] We are the species that built civilization. We are the species that plant seeds that later get reaped for harvests and we have agriculture because of it, we sent people to the Moon. And so we actually do have an incredible capacity to think ahead. Not to say that it's easy, but we are in people alive today are in a generation where we need to think ahead even more than our predecessors in history. So we have longer lifespans. So just from a personal point of view, we need to be able to think to a longer lifespan plan for a longer lifespan. But if you look at problems like climate change, where we're actually engineering the climate of the future for future generations, a hundred years into the future or longer, we just have greater demand on us. We have greater obligations because of that power to shape the future at scale and because of our knowledge of how we're doing it. And so we need these tools more than ever. It's urgent. And so I felt the need to share them through this book and to make clear that it's not time, as Jonathan Franzen has recently argued in The New Yorker to accept climate defeat because we're just too frail and weak as creatures to do this, it's actually the time to amp up, amp up the stakes, amp up the ante and just grow this arsenal of tools that we can use to think ahead. Leah Stokes: [00:10:16] Yeah, I think that's great. You know, there have been a number of writers Nathaniel Rich, as well as Jonathan Franzen, who have sort of created a view of climate change as being about individual failure as opposed to thinking about incentives or corporate power, things like that. So I take your point totally on climate change. Bina Venkatraman: [00:10:31] Yeah. And on that sort of on that point too, I will say that one of the things that I think is really important about what I'm arguing in the book, I'm not arguing we should all take this on alone. I think there are a number of ways in which we have to hold our institutions accountable and that we rely on, so we rely on society and community to help us do things like discourage violence or educate the young or have currency or feed the homeless. And this is a situation like that, right? We actually need the support of institutions. We need to be able to rein in the excesses of the financial sector in order to be able to think ahead so this capacity can be unleashed. But it has to be unleashed not just by individual action, but also by policy and political power and social change. Leah Stokes: [00:11:14] Yeah, that's what's so powerful about your book. It isn't just a sort of seven habits of highly effective people individual guide to improving yourself. It's actually about how societies and communities and corporations and and also individuals can all either fall prey to myopic thinking or expand their capacity. And on that first part of the book, where you talk about individuals, you talk about how people often struggle to think more than 15 to 20 years in the future. And I found that very resonant. You know, as somebody who works on climate change, we are all very fixated right now on 2030. And I actually think some of that fixation is very powerful and positive because it has unleashed a lot of urgency for the problem. But I think especially for young people who are, you know, whether they're in high school or in their 20s and they're trying to think about their future, you know, are they going to marry or have kids or what sort of jobs are they going to have? The 2030 cliff is almost terrifying for people. And so I thought two ideas in the book that you write about, which are quite neat, are the death dinner parties and the dear tomorrow letters. And I know one of the people who does dear tomorrow. So can you just talk a little bit about those sort of individual strategies to kind of increase our own personal time horizons? Bina Venkatraman: [00:12:30] Sure. And I think, as you mentioned, it really is related to this idea of thinking beyond 2030. I agree with you that it's useful to have a deadline, but it's not mutually exclusive with being able to imagine what comes beyond that deadline. And I do worry that the future is going dark in our imaginations way too quickly. And for that matter, the Trump administration wants to stop covering the National Climate Assessment anything beyond 2040. And so I think it's actually radical and important and part of how we reclaim our political power to look beyond 2040, because that's where the climate models show us what's could be really catastrophic. So I think these tools for helping us imagine the future beyond, I think of them a little bit like the ghost of Christmas yet to come in a Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas yet to come. And so he has this actual spirit that is the sort of muse of the future that allows him to inhabit the future in his imagination, in his dreams. And it's very telling that Dickens did that because we don't imagine the future very well on a routine basis, especially when we're talking flashing forward something like beyond 15 years. And so what? Some of the tools I wrote about in the book, some of the stories I tell are about ways that people have inhabited that kind of future in their lives. And one of them is, as you mentioned, the death over dinner parties, which a guy named Michael Hebb, who's a Seattle based entrepreneur, started because he lost his own father when he when his father was 40. Bina Venkatraman: [00:13:55] And so when Michael turned 40, he started this kind of movement in at his own home, where he basically kind of play acted his own death. He showed up in a coffin to dinner, and then he invited people around his birthday dinner to talk about death, their expectations, their fears around death. He talked about his own desires of what would happen at his death. It was a way of sort of getting people to talk about the future that they don't like to talk about, and this has become sort of a viral movement. It's been done. I think more than 100000 dinners have been hosted around the world. Death is a very specific kind of future, I will say, and often I feel like people are better at imagining death than they are at imagining life beyond 15 years. And I find myself, you know, I've been swimming in the waters off of Cape Cod this summer, even though there have been great white sharks all around. And I actually find it pretty easy to contemplate death by a shark attack, but not so easy to think about inexorable sea level rise or getting older and having dentures. Like, that's not so easy to imagine. And so I think we need some tools that are beyond like the anchors that are not just about dying, but about a future that involves living and survive. Bina Venkatraman: [00:15:05] Surviving and thriving and the dear tomorrow letters started by Jill Cuthbert and Trisha Shrum, this effort, these behavioral economists who are also mothers, really wanted to help people inhabit the future under climate change, and so they invite people to write letters to either their future selves or future children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews 50 years in the future. And so that whole, the whole idea behind that is perspective taking. So you're actually empathizing with someone, a human being in the future, someone who you have continuity with in the present and you're imagining the world they're going to inhabit and you're describing it and you're describing how the choices we have in the present actually affect and could shape that world. And it's part of solving what are some of the cognitive biases we have when we start to think about futures that we haven't yet experienced, we tend to pretend like they're never going to happen or we sort of sanitize them. But the role of perspective taking, I think of it almost as imaginative empathy. It's finding a way to empathize with a person in the future or a situation in the future, and I think it can be very helpful for people. And I sort of hope everyone does it before they vote in the primaries and in the election so that they can keep sort of issues of the future at the top of their agenda as they're thinking about using their political power. Leah Stokes: [00:16:23] Yeah, I like that a lot. Perspective taking is a powerful tool, and you also write about Marshall Ganz in the book and social movements and the role that imagination plays in those movements. And it's funny because you and I both meditate, and that is a practice that is so focused on cultivating mindfulness. And of course, that that doesn't mean you're like myopically focused on the present, but that you are in the present. And yet, I think what's so interesting about the stories about Marshall Ganz and social movements is that there's power to an imagination in in projecting out into the future and in painting possibilities. So, for example, with the Sunrise movement, they have to have wins that they're trying to work towards, whether that's getting a climate debate or getting people elected and specific elections. And then they also have to think sort of long term about like what? What would a future look like that they actually want to win? So I wonder how how do you sort of see social movements kind of taking up some of the ideas in the book as well? Bina Venkatraman: [00:17:25] Yes. So I've been very impressed by what the Sunrise movement has done, and it really is an embodiment of some of the research I've done in the book, which predated the movement. And it's so great to see it manifesting in this movement, led by primarily young people, the sunrise movement and the idea that we can't just imagine a future that looks like the status quo, for example, or that, well, we can. And we often do only imagine a future that looks exactly like the present, or we might dread the future, especially when it comes to climate change. We are looking at a lot of sort of doomsday scenarios often or catastrophic scenarios, and the research I unearth for the book and experts like Marshall Ganz, who I spoke to, kind of bolstered this idea that we, if we want to feel like we have agency and the ability to act to shape the future for the better. If you want to engage more people in that process, you need not just a warning of future harm that has a role to play. And I don't want to discount that and we need to keep that science really kind of salient in our minds. But we also need to be able to imagine a future that's better than what we have today. And Marshall talked about how that was a major feature of the U.S. Civil Rights movement in the sixties, fifties and sixties of the United Farm Workers movement in the 60s and 70s, where he was a sort of key strategist working with Cesar Chavez himself before he became a sociologist at Harvard. Bina Venkatraman: [00:18:48] Studying these movements. And what he really underscores is that it wasn't just about resisting the conditions of society in these particular eras and these particular movements. It was also about imagining what does it look like when kids of different colors ride the bus together and go to school together? What does it look like when a lunch counters integrated? What is this free and equal society look like? And to be able to give that dream to people? If you want to use Martin Luther King Junior's terms, or if you want to use more positive or current terms, you know what is the vision that we want our society to move towards? What is that positive imagined future that that can bring a lot more people into a movement? And I love that you brought up Buddhism, and this point has come up before and some of my conversations about the book, and I really don't think it's incompatible to think about and imagine the future and how what you most value, what you most want to pass on to the future, as well as being mindful of the present moment and enjoy the present moment when it needs to be enjoyed or or or really just kind of be in the present moment, exist in it. What I think is the most dangerous in our culture of instant gratification is actually in between those two spaces. Bina Venkatraman: [00:19:55] I feel like we're so often on the space of eagerly anticipating or facing with anxiety, the immediate next, the immediate next moment. So. Present bias is a little bit of a misnomer in that sense, I feel like our bias is often towards what can I get right now? What can I do right away? And that's like, not really this moment. That's the next moment. And I think when we're kind of in that mindful state, you know, I talk about this heirloom that I inherited from my great grandfather in the book. It's sort of the culminating chapter at the book where I use this heirloom that I received. It's so powerful and meaningful to me as a metaphor for creating shared heirlooms in our communities and our society and the heirloom itself. When I'm holding it, I'm touching. It's wood, it's called a Dhoruba. It's got dozens of strings, sympathetic strings, and it's played with a bow and I'm with it in the moment. But it also represents to me my role in time, my role as a descendant, my role as an ancestor. So it has a transcendence from the present moment where I'm treasuring it and valuing it. But it also makes me position myself as one of the threads in the fabric of time and needing to be able to think about a future person or community that I passed this object onto. Leah Stokes: [00:21:09] Yeah. Well, that's so interesting because of course, like in Buddhist teachings, there's a whole tradition of lineage and passing it on right that the Dharma is something that is stewarded by a community, a sangha, and that it is passed on over time. And I totally take your point about the sort of leaning forward because again, in Buddhist theory, it's that's actually craving that's the root of suffering, right? So you're entirely right that that's that leaning forward and that constant craving is not really about being present minded. And instead, what you're kind of talking about is what we might call intention, right? What are you leaning towards in a long term kind of dream sense in terms of what we want to come to pass, not in terms of like craving in a in a short term sort of way? Bina Venkatraman: [00:21:53] Right. What are our aspirations for the future? What do we really value that we want the future to have? We can't predict the future perfectly, but we know that we want future generations to have clean air and water. We know that we want the forests that we love and the oceans we love to survive, right? And we probably know some things about what we ourselves want in the future, right? Whatever that is, the what brings us joy, what brings us meaning? Leah Stokes: [00:22:16] Yeah. Fascinating. Well, another thing that you talk about in the book, which very much resonated with me, was about measurement because I am one of those people who loves to track and measure things. Yeah, I just find it motivates me and not so much to say. Oh, I did well or I did poorly. But somehow the act of tracking is motivating. And in the book, you sort of distinguish between a sort of an urgent versus important thing that resonates with the seven habits of highly effective people, and you really think about... Bina Venkatraman: [00:22:44] That's so funny. I never thought about that book as being all related to mine was funny. Leah Stokes: [00:22:51] It totally does. You know, that's a really core distinction in his work, right? That you can't just do what's a burning fire? You have to think about the longer term intention, right? Bina Venkatraman: [00:23:00] I confess I never read that book. Well, that's why I'm not so effective. Leah Stokes: [00:23:04] But now you've got the same idea in that particular one. But, you know, I think the question is, what metrics? What should we actually measure in order to get the outcomes that we want? Because a lot of what is getting measured now is sort of a capitalist or gamification kind of way is short term stuff that doesn't really matter whether that's like step counting as you talk about in the book or even something like GDP, for example. And all the weight that obscures as you talk about with Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen's work, the broader wealth of society. So how do you think about measurement vis-a-vis, for example, climate change or some of the other goals that we have in society? And how can we get our measures better so that we're thinking ahead in a more constructive manner? Bina Venkatraman: [00:23:50] So you formulated the question perfectly because it reflects really the thinking of the book, which is that so many metrics are just locking us on the short term and we're neglecting both risk and opportunity in the future because of that. And so, for example, with GDP, as you mentioned, right, you can have a boost in GDP in the short run, for example, that even sustained for a couple of years when there's been a major natural disaster that's been a humanitarian crisis because you have spending to rebuild that gets poured into a country, for example, and GDP per capita, even which people say is better because it's spread out tells you about the population, even that, you know, that was steadily rising before the financial crisis in 2008, 2007, 2008 in the U.S. And so we have these measures, but they often hide the real risk to the system. They often hide the real places where we should be investing. And so I talk a lot about replacing short term metrics or myopic metrics with milestones. So measures that are better proxies of the long term outcome we actually want to achieve, and it's sometimes difficult to come up with what they should be in the case of GDP. I mean, I looked at the work of economists like Tyler Cohen and others who have argued for something like a wealth plus measure that would measure caregiving in a society, depletion of natural resources, you know, the country of Bhutan measures gross national happiness as an alternative, but it's really hard for any single measure to actually reflect what it is that leads to a society's progress. And so I kind of caution in the case of looking at society as a whole against picking a specific measure and just saying this is the measure of whether a society is becoming better off or worse because it is going to necessarily limit your vantage point in your perspective. Bina Venkatraman: [00:25:33] That said, in areas like corporations where quarterly profits and near-term stock price are the prevalent short term metric, there's a real opportunity to convert to better milestones or progress. And Paul Pullman, when he was at Unilever, he gets talked about a lot, but he had a real commitment to climate change and to sustainability and the supply chain of that mega company, which is responsible for Lipton Tea and Dove Soap and many other brands we know. And what he did was he stopped predicting quarterly earnings for the company. You still have to report them as a matter of law in the United States and elsewhere, but stop predicting them so that the cycle of constantly setting that deadline and having that entire company lock focus on meeting what target they set could be broken and then replacing or supplanting that metric with other metrics, including metrics tied to compensation for executives, including him. And so one of those metrics was reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, for example. And so it really matters what we measure and how we reward what we measure within organizations and communities and societies and even in our own lives, right? If you're just if you decide you declare victory on every day because you've sent 20 emails or, you know, in your case, twenty five hundred emails, no, because you're so productive Leah, you know, you might not like you wouldn't have written your book manuscript, right? So we have to really pay attention to how we're measuring and monitoring our own success. Leah Stokes: [00:26:54] You know, I've thought about this a lot vis a vis the Green New Deal and sort of renewable portfolio standards and policies, because a lot of what people have said for a long time is, look, we're making progress because we have these policies in place. We have targets at the state level, but they they forget to ask the question, Well, what is the target pointing to? Is the target pointing to deep decarbonization, you know, carbon free power on a timeline that's necessary? Is it at the scale of the problem? No. I mean, we only really have two states that do that. And yet it's kind of like people take a check the box approach where they said, Oh, if you're doing something, you get credit for doing it, whether or not the thing that you're doing is actually what we need to do. And that's something I worry a lot about with, like carbon pricing, for example, at the federal level, because I worry that if that's the only thing that we do, we'll sort of pat ourselves on the back and say, Yeah, we finally priced pollution. And that was what economists said we had to do for decades. And we'll forget that what we lost decades and those, you know, that carbon price won't get us far enough fast enough to the actual ultimate goal. And so you have to be thinking ahead in terms of why are we actually trying to go? And not just, oh, have we passed a tool that might somehow put us on a road to where we need to go, even if it's way too slow and doesn't get us where we need to go fast enough? Bina Venkatraman: [00:28:18] Absolutely. And I think that's a real danger with the policymaking apparatus as, you know, as well as I do from your work. And, you know, it's not really how Washington operates right now. I have, you know, I have skepticism about the capacity of our lawmakers and legislators to get around, get their heads around comprehensive, truly comprehensive, not just market-based mechanisms, though I do think market-based mechanisms might be part of this. The idea that climate change transcends all of these different areas, right? It's an economic issue, but it's also an issue of how we think about our borders. It's an issue of how we think about management of natural resources and how we think about investing in infrastructure. And that has to come into sort of multiple arms of policy in order to actually address where we are. And I think you make a really excellent point that, yes, we've been insisting on a particular kind of policy mechanism. I think a lot of, let's say not we, but a large number of people in the climate community have been insisting on that and the moment when political power to address this issue is gained, which I believe is coming soon. I like to think it is coming soon, right? We have to then ask ourselves, where are we now and where do we want to be in 50 years? Not where have we been trying to go for the past 20 years? And it does sort of remind me of a line in The Overstory Richard Powers book, which I know you did in Climate Book Club, where one of the characters there's sort of this question like when was the best time to plant a tree? And it's like 20 years ago, but when's the next best time to plant a tree? Well, today. So I think we're clearly in that place with climate policy and climate politics, where, yes, the best time to have done this was 40 years ago. But here we are today. It's the next best time, but let's make sure, even though we're trying to do what we've been trying to do for a long time that we're looking ahead. Leah Stokes: [00:30:06] Yeah, and maybe we need to plant five trees or slightly older trees or something like that because we've got to make up for lost time, right? Well, I wanted to bring up The Overstory because theoretically, a bunch of people listening to this have just read that for the book club. And one thing I loved about the book that really reminded me of the over story is when you talk about the bristlecone pines and the lichen that grow like millimeters by what was it like years or something like that? Bina Venkatraman: [00:30:33] Really, really slowly the some of the oldest organisms on Earth. And for this, so it's in the Optimist Telescope. But I really relied on the work of Rachel Sussman, who wrote this beautiful and photographed beautiful organisms all over the world for her book The Oldest Living Things on Earth. And yes, I really wanted to study some of the principles of organisms that endure over the course of, you know, millennia and try to ask the question looking at her work well, what has allowed them to endure? Because I think that's some of what we're asking of our systems on Earth, right in. This sort of comes into a chapter where I tell a story about some people who are trying to really save agriculture, save the enterprise of farming and fertile topsoil around the world. And of course, we know that's also an important carbon sink. And well, how do we sustain something? How do we sustain systems that have supported life on Earth have supported us to eat our food over time? And and one of the principles that emerges looking at some of these old organisms is that you can't necessarily invest both in rapid growth and in sustaining over time. So the bristlecone pine will have parts that sort of are fallow, let's say, or kind of die off right? And and it's not trying to flower every year or produce. So it can actually look like not quite a live organism, but it can survive for thousands of years. And the Pando Aspen Colony in Utah, which is maybe seven or eight thousand year old organism, it's actually one organism that has cloned itself, even though it looks like a stand of trees is actually migrating and moving to resources slowly over time to get those resources. And so I just found this to be both beautiful and inspiring to think about how the natural systems that have persisted on Earth have and can contribute to how we think about making things last in the future. But also just there were a lot of great insights from looking at these organisms. Leah Stokes: [00:32:28] Yeah, I love that in The Overstory and in your book where it's echoed this sort of way of like thinking like a tree, thinking like an organism on a time scale that, you know, grows for hundreds of years because we're so biased towards thinking like a human lifespan. And you definitely see that with some, you know, bad corporate actors and, for example, the fossil fuel industry who I just wonder how on earth they can live with themselves at a certain level. Well, I guess because they're going to die and they only have to think on their own human life scale. But if you start to broaden it out and think like a tree, think like a thousand year old organism, it really puts the industrial revolution and even the digital revolution that we're in in this moment into like a much broader, longer context. And it just makes you feel that, you know, this era that we're living in that's dependent on fossil fuels will not last forever and that we have to be planning for that transition and for, you know, a different kind of society. Bina Venkatraman: [00:33:28] Right. And one of the stories I tell in the Optimist Telescope is about West Jackson, a farmer based at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, who's now in his 80s. And he was such a charming and colorful character to spend a couple of days with. And he is inspired by the native prairie of Kansas to think about a new model for agriculture and how we grow food. And if you look at the Konza Prairie, which he took me to the prairie and its way of growing and sustaining itself and producing and producing and by the way, there are wild perennial grains produced out of it, has lasted it. It survived the dust bowl. It survived right different eras of excess in human society. And and so I think we really need these examples of what has persisted in one can persist in order to better imagine what we can do for the future. Leah Stokes: [00:34:16] Yeah. So there was a sort of a slightly different thing I'd like to talk to you about, which is sort of government policy that's in the book, which I think was really insightful. The National Flood Insurance Program is a really important policy that has some flaws, and that's being talked about right now in the primary. And you tell a story from South Carolina about a community that was trying to basically avoid building a huge development in a floodplain. And you write about how preparing for disasters can actually pay off that if you some estimates say if you put a dollar in, you get an 11 dollars back. And of course, in the primary we heat, we have candidates like Andrew Yang talking about sort of managed retreat and giving everybody a thousand dollars. And we have a really big challenge as a society coming up and already happening to some extent, like in the South Carolina case, which is where are people going to live if they live in places that are prone to hazards that are only getting worse under a changing climate. How are we going to move them? And I just love to hear some of your own thoughts about the National Flood Insurance program or about other kinds of policies that could manage sort of these managed retreat problems. Bina Venkatraman: [00:35:21] Yeah. So in a way, this is a problem that's happening community by community, which is why I wanted to tell the story of Richland County, where the capital, Columbia of South Carolina lies and how they resisted this reckless real estate development in a flood plain. And really how they did that in light of short term political interests and short term private sector interests and a huge having to fight a huge legal battle to do that. But at the same time, as you point out, it's also an issue of national policy, where national policy like the National Flood Insurance Program, which underwrites which the publicly funded program, which is massively in debt today because of disasters like the hurricanes like major floods we've been having in recent years, has been subsidizing people to live in harm's way, to live on the coast. But it's it's a huge political landmine. When when the Congress in 2012 tried to raise the rates for premiums for the flood insurance program, the the policy actually ended up getting reversed in the Obama years because there was such an outrage from people who lived on the coast who felt that they needed this insurance and they already had their homes there. And. And of course, this is we're talking about real people's homes and communities and the idea that people can just uproot from their communities in places with historic neighborhoods like New Orleans. Bina Venkatraman: [00:36:38] Right places around the world is really it's really hard and it's a difficult question at the level of families and communities. But we also have to look at the way in which the government is basically encouraging people to take off their safety belts and like stick their heads out a window going down the highway at 90 miles per hour. Like, that's how I think about this, right? We are encouraging people through programs like this to live in harm's way. And so we really have to think about the love of the policy levers to fix that. And and I think there are good programs. You know, FEMA does have this program that rewards communities for doing things like increasing their standards around floodplains or not developing really dangerous parts of the floodplain. But that could be far more ambitious. And there are particular communities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is cleared something like thousands of I'm trying to remember an exact number, but Tulsa, Oklahoma has cleared a significant number of homes from a sort of disaster high risk disaster zone. King County in Washington state has done something similar with a floodplain, and so I talk about heirlooms in the book and sort of shared heirlooms, and you could think about how a community protects its flood, natural floodplains, which are protective against future disasters like those could be thought of as a community shared heirloom that it protects at all costs. Bina Venkatraman: [00:37:55] And so there's the question of how do you kind of retroactively do that right? Like, how do we get and create the right incentives for people to move out of harm's way where they're already there? But then also the question of how do we prevent new developments from going up in these hazardous areas? And the story I tell of what happened in South Carolina highlights how the law can be really useful and important. And there was actually a U.S. Supreme Court case around the Grand Central Terminal here in New York City, where we're talking today that from 1970, that was actually used to help the South Carolina community to protect itself against the lawsuit from developers who wanted to push the the development forward. So they're actually I just think it's important to excavate all the factors that are involved when when we have these reckless real estate developments or when we think about cleaning up a disaster and we're we're spending that 11 dollars instead of the dollar, right, we're not preventing the disaster to begin with because it comes at a huge cost to all of us. In addition to the humanitarian cost, I hope I answered your question. Leah Stokes: [00:38:57] Yeah, totally, totally. Another thing that you write about, so there's actually a fair amount of legal information in this book, which I thought was cool, like going through the takings clause and the cases that you talk about with Penn Station being dismantled. Fascinating. And I understand that you end the book thinking about sort of some of the legal cases going on right now vis-a-vis climate change and young people, and we've just seen the largest demonstration in world history, I believe yesterday with the climate strike, which was led by teenagers around the world. Yeah, very powerful. And I wonder, you know, how are young people who have a longer time horizon than baby boomers or or even older? How are they trying to change the way that society is thinking about climate change? Bina Venkatraman: [00:39:43] I think they're absolutely changing it. I don't think they're trying. I think they have the moral authority and they're using it to speak for the future, and they're holding accountable the rest of us to actually act and use our political power. Because in some cases, these a lot of the youth who were in the streets, you know, millions of kids around the world yesterday don't have the power to vote in whatever society they're. Some of them live in societies where you cannot vote, and yet they are there standing in the streets saying this is the issue that is most important to us, and I write in the book about the way that we can act on behalf of the future and the need to act for future generations and leave these shared heirlooms. And the way to do one of the key mechanisms for that is to listen to young people is to use our political power to act on their behalf. And I write about the Parkland shooting the kids after the Parkland shooting and how they were asking their parents to. This is Parkland, Florida school shooting. They were asking their parents and other adults to make pledges to support gun control after that. Bina Venkatraman: [00:40:41] And I think this is another example, right of how how young people right can actually lead us if we let them lead us. And in this case, it's extending our perspective in a way into the future, not just sort of like my generation wants less gun violence, which I think is very insistent and very urgent. I think in the case of the R Children's Trust cases which are going on around the world using the public trust doctrine as a principle to say that governments have to act on behalf of future generations to protect what is in the public trust, including the climate, and that they are grossly negligent in that in that duty by virtue of of supporting the pollution of the atmosphere. So I think those cases also are showing that young people have the capacity to raise attention to this issue and to use their their, even if they don't have political, direct political power, their moral authority and the question for us, the people who do have the ability to vote and who have more political power is, are we brave enough to listen to them? Leah Stokes: [00:41:46] Yeah. Are we indeed? Well, I'd love to end it on a more personal note, which is just you write in the preface of the book or the prologue, whatever it is about your own experience of having Lyme disease. And you know, I wonder how much you connect that back to climate change and how you think about how your own life has already been affected by climate change? Bina Venkatraman: [00:42:08] Well, I think we all have places we love that we've either observed changing because of climate change or we fear changing because of climate change, and I certainly have seen some of the change right. I think that seeing flowers blooming sooner than they're supposed to bloom or seeing the fall come, come too late. In New England, for example, where I live, it's definitely a sign of the changing seasons. But when I got Lyme disease and got bit by tick, I didn't really make a direct connection like this tick is here because of climate change. And it's, you know, we all know there's a challenge with attribution of any single event to the changing climate, but we also know that vectors are getting more hospitable environments as the climate warms further and further north, the range and also the likely diseases that that will be affecting the population, right? We're expanding the number of diseases that can spread as well as the vectors. And so I think it's important for me, just as a person at a personal level, what I did was I ignored a tick bite which didn't have a bullseye, which I like to tell people because it wasn't that obvious, but it was fairly itchy and it was a bad rash and I was really busy. Bina Venkatraman: [00:43:26] I was just meeting a lot of deadlines and I was working really hard. And so I ignored this rash and it kind of went away. But it was like even left a scar. And eight months later, I realized I had Lyme disease and it took it took me a long time to fully recover and I had to go on an IV antibiotic for a month. I had the best care because I'm lucky at Mass General Hospital, which I know not everyone has, but it was really a sign to me of my own weakness or, let's say, inability to heed warning signs. And so it just brought me into this book with a sense of humility around warning people about the future and realizing that we can warn people and warn people whether it's about the changing climate or whether it's about driving safer or eating better. But we ultimately need to give people the tools they need to think ahead to actually bring the future into their lives, into their work, into society. And so it's sort of a it's just like a humbling compass for the book that I'm just as reckless as everyone else. And yet I believe that we have a far greater potential. Leah Stokes: [00:44:36] Yeah. Well, that's a wonderful place to end it, and I'm so glad you're better on that. You know, health stuff. And, you know, thanks so much for joining us on the Cultures of Energy podcast, which we have taken over from Dominic and Cymene for the week. Very generously of them. As I mentioned, I'm Leah Stokes and I'm an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara, and I was joined today by Bina Venkatraman, who has just finished a book called The Optimist Telescope Thinking Ahead In a Reckless Age, it's an excellent read, it's like a smarter version of Malcolm Gladwell, so you should definitely pick up a copy and I think you'll learn a lot, not just about climate change, but about your own way of thinking. So thanks so much for joining us Bina, Bina Venkatraman: [00:45:17] Thanks so much for having me, Leah. So fun. Yeah, we did it. You're so good. All your questions are so much.