Video: Living in the Future's Past | AWARD WINNING DOC | Jeff Bridges

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[crickets chirp] [gentle instrumental music] [horns honk] [traffic hums] [Jeff Bridges] This Earth was here before us, and it will be here long after we're gone. Every living thing on it has evolved together, over eons of time. [whale sings] And although we are part of the web of life,

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because we see it, we think we stand above it. From all that nature gave us, we have made a new world out of wilderness, and built great civilizations. It seemed there was nothing we could not do. Even the sky itself was not the limit. [Man] It's great to be back in space. [Jeff] We see the symptoms of a reality we didn't expect. Have we reached the limitations of our human nature?

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Is this the end of the line for us? It's hard to tell from our current point of view, living here in the future's past. [explosions] The world that we live in is just this shockingly blue sphere. When you see it in space, you understand there's a planet that's bowling around the sun, turning on its axis. The oceans, clouds, mountains, forests.

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You can see it all from up there. You can see over a thousand miles in any direction, and it's all moving underneath you at five miles per second. When you look at the horizon, you see a very, very thin little blue ribbon of atmosphere, and it really brings home to you, it was a shock to me and I'm a scientist, okay, I thought I had all the scales worked out, intellectually, but it was a shock to me to see how thin the atmosphere is

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and how obviously it's easily affected by what we do. This is the great challenge of our time dealing with the human impact on the environment and what it means in terms of our civilization going forward. We cut all the trees, we kill all the fish. We consume and consume. So much ecological writing, you know, just open the paper,

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is about the end of the world. As in, it's starting, like, when's it going to start? I wonder, three, two, one, and the concept "world" as a sort of way of distinguishing between human beings and everything else, has evaporated. This is the only place that we know, out of this whole universe, that we can live. Life is messy.

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We are changing multiple aspects of the Earth environment. Predicting all the effects of it is incredibly complicated. What do we do? We've been standing back and watching nature decline before our very eyes. It's on everyone's mind is why are why not doing more in response? We've used our abilities to build a huge technological society that's very advanced

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but in our essence, we're still animals, and one of the problems is that, as animals, we have certain emotions and certain tendencies that are counterproductive in our great, complex society. Spinoza, the philosopher, has said, "Man doesn't really understand all the unconscious processes "which actually really control "their conscious behaviors and thoughts." [Jeff] Perhaps the solutions we're looking for

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start in us, in our genes, our subconscious motivations, our most primal instincts. We are the most flexible species ever evolved, I would think. And when you see people thriving in the Arctic, and you see people thriving in the Kalahari Desert, and you see people thriving in the Amazon Rainforest, these are titanic accomplishments.

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But, we also have the ability to destroy all of those habitats and everything in between. [Jeff] Can looking at evolution help us understand the current conscious self we have, and the future of humanity? From an evolutionary perspective, humans are just another species. We're unique, but evolutionary biology sees every species as unique. [birds chirp] [owl hoots] Every species, everywhere, is a genius at survival,

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otherwise it wouldn't be here. Every species can teach us something. When you look at all the different life forms, the plants and the animals, they just seem so different to each other. But, of course, we're all made of the same stuff. The atoms, which make the molecules, which produce the DNA, and the diversity started this process of natural selection. And, so we know that natural selection has allowed diversity to appear as a process of winning out those who are most suited to the environments.

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Natural selection has evolved different lineages of organisms, and we are at the top of one of those lineages. The fact we're animals doesn't mean that underneath our sophisticated civilization we are these utilitarian lumps, it's exactly the opposite. What it means is that being sophisticated and artistic goes all the way down and leads to the level

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of beetles with iridescent wing cases. Because there is something intrinsically nonutilitarian and playful about evolution. We're part of the system, we're nature. We're part of the Earth, and we're fundamentally dependent on its good graces. Very symbiotic relationship to everything on this Earth. And I understand some people that if they say

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"no, no, this is a science thing, "it's not for us, that's the province of God, we shouldn't go there." I can hear that view, but I really don't think it's what I see in scripture. What I see in scripture is, c'mon, I wanna to show it to you. I want to reveal myself to you. I don't see science as challenging my faith. In fact, I see it as affirming my faith. We are new on the planet.

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We are the most newly evolved. We're a trial run. In terms of evolution, animals adapt to their ecological conditions, but as humans, we have been able to control our ecological conditions. Evolution itself is a process by which organisms become more efficient at extracting resources from their environment. Humans are unique in that what makes us so different from all other animals is our mastery of technology.

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We're uniquely able to transform our environment in ways no other animals can. [Jeff] We humans are really big-brained primates that lucked out by becoming bipedal and discovering how to coerce other animals from a distance, by being able to throw. We figured out how to tame fire and use it to our advantage. Our evolving technology allowed us to expand into new territories and manipulate the environment

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in ways that gave us an edge. Places like this remind me about how harsh nature can be. We're so used to living in air conditioning, and having the comfort of the modern world, but when you go out into nature and experience it first hand, you're reminded very powerfully about how weak we are as an animal. [Jeff] And this is because we are fundamentally a cultural species.

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Culture is our life support system. Our cumulative culture allows us to cushion ourselves against the harsh realities of the environment and to reshape the environment. Our culture is an integral part of our ecology. We can trace human ancestors back over four million years, and anatomically modern humans for more than 200,000 years and we have inherited their successful survival traits.

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These traits are in all of us, to some extent, traits like optimizing time, really caring about what other people think about us, and comparing ourselves to others. We are still trying to attain the same daily emotional state as our successful ancestors. We carry the same neurotransmitters in our brains that created the exhilarating feeling our ancient ancestors got

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when they had the unexpected reward of finding a berry or a nut, or were looking forward to a successful hunt. But in a culture of amazing technology, we are surrounded by ready-made stimuli pushing us to reward ourselves. Our evolutionary impulses can be easily hijacked. Irrespective of where you grew up in the world, it's in our DNA to copy those around us.

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For humans, imitation is part and parcel of what it is to be a member of a tribe. [Jeff] Now our adaptations are primarily to the cultural environment we created around us. If we don't fit into our culture, we're not going to reproduce, we're not going to survive very well. We're going to be ostracized, and being ostracized in a social species like ours, can feel like a death sentence.

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Do we have a human brain mismatched between how we evolved to be here, and the modern circumstances we find ourselves in? Are our needs any different from our ancestors? Need, the word, can mean strongly desire, can't it, like, I really need a bar of chocolate, and I'm afraid to say, that from my point of view, I'm sure Neanderthals would have totally loved Coca-Cola Zero. Like, they looked really good and pure

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because they didn't have it, you know. It's us poor saps, but, presumably, they got the same nervous system. If it's true that Neanderthals would have also become addicted to Angry Birds, there's something true in contemporary society, contemporary society is saying something true about ancient people. This is a modern human brain, and as far as we can tell, it's identical to the brain of individuals who lived 50,000 years ago. But of course, the information which is stored

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in the modern brain is very different to that of our ancestors. The brain really, basically encodes information, and that information will change from one generation to the next. So you can see the course of human evolution as the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge that we pass on from one generation to the next. [wind howls] Our perceptual system isn't attuned to the massive changes that are happening on the planet,

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nor are they attuned to the very fine-grained details of those changes. Our brain's alarm system for threat, the amygdala, the emotional centers, are very tuned to these earlier dangers from a time when that rustle in the bushes might be a tiger that was about to eat you, or today's symbolic realities, I'm not being treated fair, or "honey, we have to talk",

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or whatever it is that triggers you. We have a very quick system that is sort of dealing with gut reactions with reflex responses, with an instant response to danger. And on the other hand, we have a slower, more deliberative system which takes time to engage, and which is slow and ponderous,

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that we should keep engaged when we're looking at complex issues in the world around us. [gentle instrumental music] [Jeff] We are physical and biological beings living in an ocean of cosmic energy. That sounds pretty trippy, and it is. Where every part contains information about the whole. The long view is both forward and back.

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[birds chirping] For 99.9% of our evolutionary history, we were hunting and gathering people, living in small kin groups where everybody was related to everybody and therefore we had a vested interest in taking care of each other. We also lived off of the land in such a way that we did not live beyond the carrying capacity of the environment. [midtempo instrumental music]

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There was no way to store food for long periods of time, and therefore, there was no ability to acquire surplus. What this resulted in was it created a very egalitarian social system where women had autonomy, there was no real rigid dominance hierarchy among men, and it was only after the invention of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals that humans were faced with the situation of what to do with these surplus resources. [Jeff] This was the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution.

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We started farming for the first time. Everything took off from there, and that's only been around 12,000 years. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Controlling the production and distribution of these surplus resources led to a change in human cultural and social organization. [cannon fire] [crowd yelling] Cultural evolution is a transferrable system a lot like DNA.

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It has all the properties of an evolving system. Since we found agriculture, things changed. And we we started to act like a larger entity just like an ant colony, or a termite colony, or a beehive. [bees buzz] [Jeff] Bees and ants are individual organisms performing different roles. They rush about to feed or defend the colony

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and collectively they create a superorganism. Of course, humans are not social insects, but if you were able to watch a village or a city from a distance over time, it looks a lot like a growing, interdependent superorganism. A reorganization of material existence with far reaching implications. [traffic hums] [siren wails] Today we live in a world of material abundance

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and inexpensive energy, and this leads us to think that this is normal for humans, that it's the normal human condition. Early societies, even through the Middle Ages, and up until almost the modern era had 90% of their economies devoted to the production of energy, primarily in the form of food. That meant that 90% of what people did involved producing energy, in other words, just getting by.

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[Jeff] Our lives were based on solar flows. Sunlight hit the earth, photosynthesis grew the plants, rain and soil, with the nutrients, grew crops, animals ate the crops, and we ate the animals. Energy transforms from one state to another. Our bodies were product of the current sunlight of the day. And we are just transient entities, which appear,

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move a little bit, and then disappear. That's the way the system works. And, we have this chance to be alive, to move on this planet, to do things on this planet, to create things on this planet because we have this gigantic flux of energy coming from the sun. [midtempo electronic music] The whole universe is a giant machine

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for dispersing energy potentials. Energy is everything in the sense that nothing moves in the universe without an energy potential available. [birds chirp] We have been also able to increase this already very large amount of energy by means of using ancient processes frozen below the ground in the Earth's crust

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in the form of what we call fossil fuels. [Jeff] Fossil sunlight is so powerful it's indistinguishable from magic. And we're mining this ancient sunlight in a very brief period of human history. [ambient electronic music] A chemical composition of 50% of the protein in our bodies and 80% of the nitrogen in our bodies indirectly comes from the chemical signature

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of this fossil sunlight that we're mining. So, we are different than our ancestors. They were made of sunlight, we are made of fossil fuels. In hunting and gathering societies, solar energy can provide enough food to support maybe one person per square mile. Basic subsistence agriculture can support more people, but nowhere near the population densities

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that we have today. The way we live is an anomaly. So there's really no way for anyone to know at a sort of visceral level that there are any problems with the system, and if you look around, it all works. We know historically, I mean, to the extent that we even pay attention to it, we used to use wood. We're sort of aware that our predecessors used wood and they used so much of it, they had to switch to something else. They switched to coal.

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And then they switched to oil. 80 years ago, the oil in America was just under the surface. We would need very little machinery to get these gusher wells, and we would get out over 100 times the energy that we put in. Suddenly this whole new world of transportation opened up, and with that this entirely new model for how we fed ourselves, how we clothed ourselves, how we built shelter,

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and it totally changed the way we live. It made it possible for us to move away from the country. [birds chirp] Throughout human history, we had to live sort of scattered in order to not tax any particular resource too greatly. As we began to be able to import food, or import energy, we could pretty much live wherever we wanted to, and where we wanted to live were in the cities. So, we have this massive migration,

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and we empty the countryside. We all move to the city because we're growing food in the country, and we can just transport it to the city, and once you're in the city, then you can do all these other things. You know, you can create all this knowledge, you can create technologies, you can create this massive economic growth, and the longer you've been living that way, the harder it is to remember what allowed it to start in the first place, and that was this idea of cheap energy. [ambient electronic music]

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[moves into uptempo electronic music] Humans gradually became a functional superorganism. At first, we would maximize grain surplus. We would grow more grain and store it, and that would allow our population to increase and our territory to expand, but now we're maximizing surplus value. We're maximizing financial, digital, electronic

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representations of surplus. But all money really effectively is is a claim on some energy services. And so what ends up happening, is money, trade, technology are all in service of the superorganism. [Jeff] It's nearly impossible for individuals to function independently in modern society.

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We contribute to and rely on a growing superorganism to feed us, clothe us, power our sophisticated communications, even protect our societies from each other through highly organized warfare. We live within a mesh of energy-eating interdependence and we never really see the big picture. A state of plenty can have unintended consequences.

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It is the paradox of our times. [chicks peep] Running in the background of all that we do whether we consider ourselves to be capitalist or soviet or feudal, everything is a kind of program, a kind of recipe, a kind of algorithm, the logistical functioning of Neolithic society, which started all over the world.

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The trouble is that when you wash, rinse, repeat, eventually, when you do it enough times, it starts to reveal its flaws. For example, me starting my car is statistically meaningless from a global warming point of view. Billions and billions of car ignition turnings has a meaning, and that's the paradox. All of a sudden, we realize that we're part of a superorganism. We are enmeshed in systems of production,

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systems of manufacture, systems of use. It's incredibly important to recognize that we're all part of the system. [ambient electronic music] As social organisms, we're something like ants. Our signals that we exchange are far more complicated than the simple chemical signals that ants exchange, but we do exchange signals, and as humans,

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we take individual actions that, on the whole, cause emergent behavior. The problem that's happening today is that the emergent behavior is growing very complex and detrimental to the planet, to ourselves, and to many other species. [geese call] [Jeff] Emergent behavior is all around us, and can be fastmoving and unpredictable. No one could foresee our patterns of interaction would lead to the internet, the smart phone,

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the disappearance of phone booths, and the rise of server farms. Who knows what will happen next? [birds chirp] [camera shutter clicks] We're all in this together. Maybe if you're off the grid and truly walking everywhere you go, maybe then you have the right to polish your halo. We're tiny little microbes on the surface of this huge planet. We can actually affect the planet and cause it to respond.

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[somber electronic music] If we don't stop emitting carbon dioxide at these rates, pretty soon we're going to be in trouble. We're going to have massive climatic disruption. The rainfall belts will move. People in the hundreds of millions, maybe a billion and a half people, will have problems getting access to fresh water and food.

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The issue is not what the world is like when it's cold or when it's warm. We are in a time of change. What is interesting is how the world changes when you dramatically, in our case, increase the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Or, when it suffers mammoth biodiversity loss caused by our own behavior. If there's a big change coming,

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and we want to know what it might do in the future, what do we do? We look at what's happened in the past. Geological history largely reinforces the lessons from the climate models. When they say the doubling of carbon dioxide will lead to about 2 1/2 degrees to three degrees of warming, the history of the Earth is broadly in agreement with that. So a lot of my own research is focused on the reconstruction of past climate. We look at dramatic transitions and there's not a lot of those, because in Earth history,

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things change gradually. Three years ago I started on a project. It was to look at an event that was about 120 million years ago. And it was to explore exactly this. It was what we generally considered a rapid ocean acidification event, a rapid warming event, and we thought, let's look at this, and see what happened. And as we studied it more and more, and we got better and better at age models, we got better and better reconstructions

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of the climate change, it became apparent that this particular event that happened about 100 million years ago, the climate change happened over about 40,000 years. This is the same degree of climate change that we think might happen over the next 100 years. There's much more energy in the system. [waves crash] We have very little knowledge

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of how Earth's biological life support systems will respond to dramatic and rapid change. We have extraordinary biomes on the planet that all are individual pieces of a jigsaw. [animals call] The picture is clear when they're all functional and all present. But start picking those pieces off,

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and you can no longer see, really, what that picture looks like, and the functionality of the entire system is out of whack. [bee buzzes] The arctic icecap is shrinking, the Greenland ice mass is being lost at 300 gigatons a year, that's 300 cubic kilometers of ice a year is disappearing. The ocean is changing, sea level rise, we're seeing significant sea level rise,

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we're expecting a couple of feet, maybe more before the end of the century. So all these things are facts. [gulls call] It's not so much the change itself, but it's how fast it's happening. The faster the change comes, the less time we have to adapt. The faster the change comes, the less time the trees have to adapt, or plankton living in the ocean. The faster the change comes,

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the less time ecosystems have to adapt. And the more complex these are, the harder it is to actually predict what the consequences of that change will be. Climate change is going to put huge stress on societies that are already under internal political stress, and stress induced by lack of resources. Like, food availability, water availability,

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dramatic events associated with climate change, all of which potentially will exacerbate the divisions in society. Access to wealth creates divisions. Access to food and water makes divisions very pronounced. It's gonna impact the way humans live on the planet. And when that impacts, then people move, people are angry, land becomes less valuable, or more valuable.

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Populations shift, and those shifts destabilize governments. Huh! [weapon fires] [Jeff] We might look up at night and wonder at the far away stars as if we were in a pristine crystal snow globe. But our problems can no longer be pushed into the back yard of the less powerful, the less fortunate among us. No, here we are, and here we were made,

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where everything from farmers, dogs, LED lights, flowers, pencils, politicians, microwaves, and penguins, the past, present, and future are all interrelated. [gentle instrumental music] [birds chirp] [machine buzzes] In the next 10 years, we shall increase our wealth by 50%.

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The profound question is does this mean we will be 50% richer, in a real sense, 50% better off, 50% happier? And so to just get more facts about climate change or about oil depletion or about environmental destruction, people don't know what to do because they're part of this organism

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trying to get more feelgood brain chemicals. The treadmill is getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And, the number of people who want to be on the treadmill is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually, there's going to be no room to run, and so, people will fall off. Many people will fall off. We are profoundly motivated by having purpose. We're motivated by having a sense of autonomy,

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efficacy, and control. Where it seems that our gifts, our energy, our life force is not going to have some impact, we will simply withdraw, and we will very likely redirect that energy into where we can feel we have most impact. And where is that in our culture right now?

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It's in consumption. The economist Immanuel Wallerstein has talked about world systems theory, in which all things are connected for better, and often for worse, so, living here in the most industrialized part of the industrialized world, our tentacles reach everywhere. [wind whistles] [birds chirp]

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[Jeff] Efficacy is the ability to produce a desired result. But are the results we're achieving, the ones we intend? Wild animals are disappearing forever. Our intelligence is remaking the world before our eyes. Today we can just click on a link somewhere, and have something appear on our doorstep without having any idea of what went into getting it there. All we know about what got it there is the price.

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We get more and more detached from the actual cost of creating and transporting what we're using. Energy is really at the center of physics, but for the lay person, probably the easiest way to explain it is that energy is the ability to do work. Work is force through distance. So every time that you move something from China to the US or from the floor to the ceiling, that takes energy. When you drive to work, obviously it takes energy.

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To boil one quart of water, it takes up the equivalent of 500 calories of food. Any kind of transformation requires energy. We are powerful creatures on this planet, but we still need the ecosystem to survive, so we don't want to destroy the ecosystem because it would be rather bad. And this is a transition, you can call it also a revolution, you can call it whatever you'd like. The point is that there have been such revolutions,

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such transitions in the past, but these transitions have a cost. An energy transition must be paid in energy. [midtempo electronic music] [Jeff] Energy is the currency of life. [birds chirp] Energy creates movement and food. All life taps energy flows. [horse sighs]

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We used to measure units of energy in terms of horsepower. One horse could do the work of 10 men. A small tractor could do the work of 40 horses. It would take 450 horses or more to get the same work done as just one semi truck. And unlike horses, trucks can work day and night in any weather. The flow of fossil fuel has turbocharged our society. And so, to just say, we have the science now

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to realize that these fossil slaves, they don't complain, they don't sleep, they're tireless, they're super strong, but they poop and they breathe, and their breath is causing our biosphere to warm up, and our oceans to acidify. Let's keep them in the ground. It's not quite so simple. If you consider the power that's in fossil fuels, 90% of the work done in human economies is done

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by fossil slaves. The average American consumes 220,000 kilocalories, every day. We don't think about that, we only think about the 3,000 or 3,500 of food that we eat. But our energy footprint is almost a hundred times more than that if you consider our buses, and our airplanes, and all the hospitals, and the Disneylands, and the NASCARs,

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and in all the various things that we buy that are imported all around the world. It's what people invest in, and a lot of pension funds, and a lot of the institutions that humanity depends on, of course they gravitate toward oil. Renewable energy, although it's mature and it's getting very cheap, it's not going to replace this infrastructure and this civilization.

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We have a very limited amount of time to transition to a low-carbon economy, but it's very naive to just say, let's keep it in the ground and keep everything else running. So if you ask "can solar energy power our society "as it is today?", then you already have the answer. It is no, it is not possible. If you want to switch from oil and gas and coal

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and to move to solar energy, then you have to change a lot of things. Our food system right now is an energy sink. We use 10 to 12 fossil-calories to produce one food-calorie. Right now we have around $100 trillion worth of machinery on the planet that uses gasoline or diesel fuel. So, for one barrel of oil, which we pay $50 for,

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we have thousands of fossil slaves standing behind us. The American inventory of automobiles, 250, 270 million cars and light trucks on the road, you're talking about more than a decade of production and you're talking about more wealth than the gross domestic product in a year to replace it So you're not going to make these changes overnight.

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You see, there is a parameter which is very basic in evaluating these kinds of things, which is called energy return on energy invested. Energy doesn't cost dollars. I mean, it does, but it really costs energy. Oil's the biggest industry on the planet, so, it sets the pace, in terms of inflation. So if you raise the price of oil,

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all the other prices go up, until people have accommodated, and they can still afford to pay the extraction cost for oil. So, it's not like we're running out of oil, or coal or gas, it's that it's getting more costly, in energy terms, to get it. Because it's more costly, it has less benefits to the rest of society. The 1930s, the Beverly Hillbilly oil just bubbling under the ground, we've used all that.

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Net energy, which is the energy left after we've paid the energy cost of finding and extracting it, net energy is declining now. We don't realize the scale and the stakes of what's happening. When we take on debt, we are promising to repay it with future energy. The fossil fuels will not last forever, they cannot last forever. The energy potential in one barrel of oil

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is equal to a human being working 40 hours a week for 4 1/2 years. You have to think to the future, you have to save something for the future in order to have a harvest of renewable energy. Do not eat your seed corn, is an old saying. [somber instrumental music] [Jeff] Wise farmers know that if they eat their seed corn,

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there will be nothing left to plant for a future harvest. Will future generations look back at today and view much of the energy we're burning to have been wasted? Are we eating our seed corn? So many of us have come to expect the level of comfort and convenience unprecedented in our biological past. We need to redefine our expectations not as what we will lose, but what we might gain,

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by preparing for something different. Oh, fossil fuels are bad? We need to keep them in the ground, so we've got this big divestment campaign where we stop investing in coal and oil and natural gas. But if we stop investing in the stocks, as long as we continue to fly and drive and have infrastructure built around cheap transportation and global connectivity of supply chains,

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then some hedge fund will just buy those stocks back five cents cheaper. We can very easily get into the mode, for example, when we think about oil, of addiction speech. I'm going to leave this bottle of whiskey in the cupboard, and I'm not going to touch a drop of it, which means that I'm still fixated on this whiskey, paradoxically. This is actually, of course, not really thinking differently.

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There's a little bit of a hangover from this myth that things should be functioning smoothly and that smooth functioning is something that's real. [waves crash] [crickets chirp] If you find yourself 10 or 20 years from now in a world where energy isn't cheap, you're going to have to unwind, somehow, this massive global city system. So you look back in history to times

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when this has happened before, I mean, the Roman Empire, one of the reasons it fell was it was no longer able to continue to bring in food and other supplies to Rome and the other big city states. And cities no longer were habitable, they just didn't function anymore. So what happens this time around? And in the past it's been conflict with other tribes that has brought human progress, such as it is,

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at a tremendous cost of slaughter. [bombs whistle] World War I brought forth radio and airplanes. World War II gave us nuclear energy. Space race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the Cold War that gave us communication satellites and global positioning and many other things, and now we're into something where we have to work collectively. We can't work against each other,

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we have to work with each other, we have to work with each other with the view of the future, not against each other in the present. The trouble is not so much in what we're thinking about the world we live in, it's in terms of how we think about the world we live in. [somber electronic music] [waves crash] Well, here we have a human brain. When you see it in reality,

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it seems kind of a bit disappointing, doesn't it? It's very small for what it does, if you think about what we're capable of, then to think it all comes out of a little object like that, it's quite remarkable. [Jeff] Let's take a moment to imagine entering into a theoretical world where everything in existence, at all scales, has equal value. From skyscrapers and trees, to humans, cola, cups,

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and orangutans, shoes, and suitcases, vessels, water, diamonds, and dragonflies. Even time itself. If we can imagine every thing is intrinsically equal, then we'd know that what we perceive as reality comes from the value judgements that exist in our minds.

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If everything exists in the same way, then we have an interesting problem. If it's true that even just by existing I am killing a huge number of life forms, then I have to figure out what kinds of life forms I'd like to kill, and I have to be rather conscious and explicit about it, and being conscious and explicit about stuff is an incredible drag. There's always an unintended consequence of what you're doing, for example. [chemicals hiss]

00:47:30

[water rushing] Reality is happening on a number of different scales, all at once. You can never get it completely right, so we're confronted again with the notion of exploring various different shades of hypocrisy. You know the famous study, if I offer you $20 now, or I can give you $50 in a week's time, people just kind of are almost, kind of compelled to go for the short term.

00:47:55

To go for the short term. Yeah, if you think about it, up to a point, that's very rational. -Mm. Because you could be dead. That's right, you don't know who's going to [laughs]. Right? So, the Bird in the hand, worth two in the bush. Absolutely, so there is some rationality to that discounting. Organisms that worried about 50 years from now were outcompeted by organisms that worried about 5 minutes from now. Our fate is in our own hands. No one else.

00:48:25

[wind whistles] [thunder rumbles] [ambient instrumental music] [Jeff] How will we shape the future towards a better outcome? What defines our identity? [bird chatters] Are we our urges? Are we our principles? Who are we? Who I am is really the accumulation of my experiences

00:49:13

with other people, my interactions with other people. Babies don't have a "self" concept, they don't have an idea of who they are. But as they interact with other people, they begin to create an image of themselves, a feeling of who they are, and thoughts about who they are. That's really picked up from the views and responses of other people. In this modern society, people spend a large amount of time and effort

00:49:45

accumulating objects and possessions, and sometimes these have no particular use, whatsoever. But it's almost as if we have to acquire things around us to make a statement of who we are. We use objects as an extension of ourself. In the life of sentient beings, desire is inevitable. The kind of plastic products that consumerism makes out of desire might be optional, but desire is inevitable.

00:50:12

That same drive is what makes it easy for Apple to sell us a new iPhone every year. I mean, I guarantee you, you don't need the next iPhone. In fact, you don't even know what new features it's going to have, and you won't know, until you see them. But you're pretty sure you're going to like them when you see them. And that was the whole point of this notion of dynamic obsolescence. You would be allowed to feel, to achieve a certain emotional state,

00:50:37

for a short period of time, and then almost as quickly as you'd achieved it, it would begin fading, and you'd have to have something else. We have a real love for a way to feel how we want to feel faster. We may have a very developed conscious mind today, with a lot of knowledge, cultural knowledge, technical knowledge, but the way we think is still very much influenced by a primitive unconscious that we developed

00:51:06

millions of years ago. [Jeff] We humans aren't just like animals, we are animals. And as animals, we compete for mates. [percussive music] Organisms in the wild that have extra resources to display, like flashy tails, or large antlers, are advertising to their mates that my genes are so good, I don't need to skimp and save,

00:51:43

because I'm so strong, I have these amazing attributes. The same phenomenon happens in human societies to impress members of the opposite sex. A lot of these displays require spending extra energy and natural resources that we don't really need to be genetically fit, but we respond to those cultural signals as if those things really do matter. This question of status and of showing our status,

00:52:17

I do believe that that's one of the most fundamental determinants of our behavior. -Yeah. Well you know who knows this best of all, is the marketing and the advertising people. Because when they're selling us stuff, and it's designer, or, what they're tapping into is this preoccupation with what other people think, because they understand, intuitively, that we're all animals seeking social status. We like things to be convenient, we like things to be new,

00:52:49

and we like bags that have names on it. We like to drink out of bottles that we can throw away. We like styrofoam containers for our fast food. Plastic itself is something that is persistent through time. It gets recycled, it gets recycled, it gets smaller, it gets smaller, and now it's right back to us and detectable, in our blood stream. [whale whistles and groans]

00:53:22

[seal barking] We're out of alignment with what we hear and we understand, and what we know is going on, and the life that I am leading, including all the things I love that might be really ecologically problematic but that I love them anyways. So we have this very positive spin on ourself, and we try to maintain that characterization

00:53:49

to the extent that we will only pay attention to information which confirms that bias. [gentle electronic music] We'll deliberately reframe things that we've done in order to keep the coherence of who we are. [audience applauds] Our brains are always creating these distortions. We have no direct contact with reality. One of the important qualities that we developed

00:54:24

that helped us survive was group identity. And today, group identity still plays an important role in our life and has an important unconscious effect on our attitudes and our actions. So we have this tendency always to attribute blame to others, rather than accepting it ourselves. And this is part of the bias which creates or keeps the coherence of this being a good person. [Jeff] So, we're all capable of running around with the wrong idea of what is really going on in our world.

00:54:55

And, there's no mechanism or voice inside us to signal the artificiality of that. We don't want to live in a state of anxiety, we want to believe that the things we enjoy doing will never change. Do we confuse what we need with what we desire, and what we desire, with what we need? Desire is logically prior to need, actually, and need is really, just, like stabilized desire

00:55:30

that's been turned, probably socially, into something seemingly necessary. And so I think we need to be a little bit careful when we talk about being in an ecological society, meaning our needs matching up with what we want. So there's this constant dance between the inhibitory centers that know what's good for us in the top of the brain, particularly the prefrontal area, and the midbrain areas, for emotional impulse,

00:55:57

which just wants to grab that yummy thing, and have it now. So, let's say we're in a bakery, everything looks so good, and our brain, which during evolution was designed to crave fat and sugar, is going nuts. It just really wants one of those yummy things. But then, our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that learns, the part of the brain that understands, says to us, you know, this is fattening,

00:56:24

and you have that blood sugar problem, it's not so great for you. And the prefrontal cortex has the ability to inhibit emotional impulse, and once we understand the true cost of the things we use and the things we do to the environment, the very same mechanism applies, and it let's us pull back to the balcony of the mind, where we see everything that's going on, then we can make a better decision.

00:56:51

This is the first step in changing our habits because without mindfulness, we don't even notice the choice points, we just blindly, spontaneously, automatically do that thing we've always done, our old habits take us over. When there's uncertainty, when there's a sense of precarity, when there's a feeling of vulnerability and confusion,

00:57:17

that's exactly when we are most susceptible, obviously, to adhering to a message, a voice, a person who comes along and is able to meet those anxieties and those uncertainties with such confidence and certainty. And so, that's what we've seen replaying over and over again in politics.

00:57:44

[audience cheers] I don't need to mention the obvious examples of what happens when the larger public's sense of fear is coopted. About half the wealth in the country is held by the top 1% of the people, and there are a lot of us out there, and my parents were certainly one of them, who were scrambling from day to day to survive.

00:58:14

And they, in their lifetimes, in the 1930s, had actually seen people starving because they couldn't earn a living. And so, most Americans haven't seen that, but some Americans still feel that way. And they feel the threat and the fear of unemployment, so they're focused nearterm. In any symbiotic relationship, who's the top and who's the bottom is a little bit confusing, and this could collapse at any moment.

00:58:47

The desire to be rescued is based on a profound and deep sense of powerlessness. [crickets chirp] Open up a paper, or watch a conventional ecological documentary, and what you'll see are all kinds of facts designed to make you feel scared, and upset, and guilty. This is how we talk to ourselves about ecological disaster.

00:59:14

Now the trouble is, that means that psychologically, we're actually still putting ourselves before a time when it happened, somehow allowing ourselves the choice to either go down that path or not. Now, the point is, we're already down the path. When we, on the climate science side, talk about the reality of climate change, at first blush it sounds like a bit of a downer. So, one's natural reaction if you hear bad news

00:59:42

and someone else tells you, no, no no, that's not true, is to at least, sort of say, hope, that the guy who is telling you that this is not going to happen is right. For six years in Congress, I said that climate change was nonsense. I really didn't know anything about it. Since I represented probably the reddest district in the reddest state in the nation, I knew that I needed to be opposed to it. And my son came to me.

01:00:10

He was voting for the first time, he had just turned 18, and he said to me, "Dad, I'll vote for you, "but you're going to clean up your act on the environment." Your child is sick. 98 doctors say, treat him this way. Two say, no, this other is the way to go. I'll go with the two. You're takin' a big risk for those kids. Some people think that what we have here is an information deficit.

01:00:38

That if we just gave people more scientific information, showed them the science, then they would come around. We've got people that make a living and a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV, pronouncing all kinds of things. They slept at Holiday Inn Express last night, and they are now experts on climate. It's an identification problem. It's, it doesn't look like my tribe,

01:01:02

doesn't sound like my tribe, doesn't sound like our war cry, doesn't sound like our song. Too often it's presented, climate science is presented, as if it's some kind of new religion, and you have to believe. No, don't ask people to believe in climate science. Just say, here's some data. Now, what does your faith tradition tell you about what to do with that data? In mine, it tells me

01:01:31

that I'm a steward of this glorious creation. Sometimes science turns out to be wrong. But other times it turns out to be very right. And the key to scientific endeavors, what we're here to discuss today, is openness, access to the data, and full challenging of the data. That's how we advance science. I look forward to hearing Mr. Chairman, thank you.

01:01:56

[Chairman] Thank you. There have been major revolutions in our thinking across civilization, for example, for thousands of years, it was thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe. We now know that that's not true. And then of course, there was also the idea that man is the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, but now we discover, through natural selection and Darwinism, that we are just one of a number of species that have existed,

01:02:21

and finally if you think about the self and the idea that we are individuals in control of all our actions and behaviors, that has been eroded away as we come to discover that this, in fact, is also not entirely true. So, I think that the science has revealed the arrogance of the individualism, the egocentrism that we have about our planet, our species, and ourselves, is unwarranted.

01:02:50

[Jeff] Ecology. It's a word derived from the Greek oikos, or household. It's the study of the relationships that interlink all the members of the Earth's household. We can't think of ecology as only existing over there, beyond, because it has no boundaries, and is in a state of constant flux. Ecology is intimate, coming right up to our skin,

01:03:23

and through it. It's permeable and borderless and chaotic. The internal and the external are always entwined. [traffic hums] [horns honk] So when we speak about sustainability, what is it that we hope to sustain? One of the problems with philosophy is that it isn't just in your head. Philosophy is everywhere.

01:04:07

Everything, in a way, was a dream in someone's head, in built space. Thought isn't just something that's in here, thought is everywhere. The story that we live in right now is that we grow the economy by consuming goods and in particular, consuming goods that exist in limited quantities. We have the tendency as meaning-making,

01:04:39

story-making people, creatures, to have characters, to have protagonists who are the villains, and who are the heroes and the rescuers, and that's deep in our human psyche, and that's how we tend to make sense of the world. And the tendency, very understandably, is to create villains, such as corporations

01:05:08

or oil industries, and to create heroes, the ecowarriors. While that's understandable, what it's actually doing is it's creating a bit of an exemption story where we as individuals are somewhat exempt or somewhat out of the story. There's a lot of criticism in our culture right now that capitalism is bad, and that without capitalism,

01:05:40

we wouldn't be impacting things. And that's partially true. [Jeff] Underpinning this system is the optimal foraging instinct that resides in our animal natures. Wolves, for instance. They're better off running down an elk than spending the same amount of time and energy chasing a mouse, or a rabbit. They're more evolutionarily fit and have more calories to raise their offspring. [wolf howls]

01:06:17

The same dynamic is in humans. We like to invest a little and get more in return. We do this in stock markets, when we get a 20% discount on shoes, a two-for-one cocktail at happy hour, or a steal of a deal buying a house on some special foreclosure. Capitalism isn't entirely good or bad. Capitalism is in service of the superorganism.

01:06:50

Together, we're functioning like a gigantic wolf pack, hungry for more energy. You know, one of the many causes of war is actually the shortage of energy. [explosion booms] Since energy is always flowing from a kind of compacted stated to a less compacted state, [explosion booms] entropy is how things are constantly running down to zero.

01:07:27

We can't actually create a machine that reverses entropy. Entropy is why time seems to only be going in one direction. Entropy is why you've never seen a broken glass reassemble as a perfect glass. And if you're looking for the perfect ecological machine that will actually fully put the energy back in to the system that the machine has sucked out of it, I'm afraid you're going to be waiting until after the end of the universe.

01:08:06

So, you always have to leave room in your analysis of animals, and animals in the broad sense, I include people in that, of thinking that we're always going to do the right thing, that we've optimized all of our actions, our foraging strategies and everything else, and we can extrapolate from there because if we had everything right, there wouldn't be any problems, would there? There'd be no poverty, there'd be no climate change,

01:08:30

there'd be no warfare. [gentle instrumental music] Where you sit determines where you stand, and if you're sort of all tied up in any particular kind of industry and you see your future there, naturally you hold on. There's no such thing as a free market. I hope people can understand that because if there were free markets,

01:08:57

you'd end up the way we ended up in the late 1800s, with a few very powerful trusts controlling all of America. Without government helping us shape the market forces, the market forces will be taken by the very shortterm requirements that are placed on them by us. By our need to go to the filling station

01:09:24

and get the cheapest fuel, by the need for the pension fund to get its 8% return, no matter what it's investing in. Really tough to earn the 6 or 7% or 8% per year that were in those actuarial calculations when the pension funds were established. So, it's not some foreign institution that makes us be short term focused, it's us. Why didn't the administration anticipate the energy crisis

01:09:53

several years ago, formulate a positive action plan and do something about it? Have to bring a different perspective to this. A couple of years ago I asked a member of Congress, I said, "what's the toughest issue you're dealing with, "right now?" And she said federal subsidies for seashore flood insurance because we've always subsidized it,

01:10:19

and the cost of the subsidies is going way up, and people insist on buying these homes that are subject to tidal erosion and to flooding, and to destruction, ultimately. There isn't transparent accountable pricing for all the impacts of the burning of fossil fuels. The markets still aren't working right, and once those costs are revealed, and put at the meter,

01:10:48

and put at the pump, then consumers will make choices that are in their self-interest. We'll be making transportation fuel on our roofs. Of course I'm not saying that we get to nirvana and we don't have any war. One of the causes of war would be less, because energy would be more abundantly available and more distributed around the world. [Jeff] If we're going to live up to our name,

01:11:17

Homo sapiens, which means wise man, we'll have to understand our subconscious motivations, our unconscious desires and justifications and the true cost of energy. When you look at the past, you're looking at a decision, decisions about how to live in the world that people in the past made. It may be technically true that we don't know everything about where our food came from.

01:11:52

We keep telling ourselves it's difficult, but just read the back of the cereal packet. It tells you what all the stuff is, and then you can figure out where it came from on Google. From what countries do the raw materials for an iPhone come from? [phone beeps] Hey there you go. Oh here, how about this, the commodity chain. [explosion booms] We know that certain things that we do now

01:12:30

turn on certain parts of our brain or inspire certain kind of attitude or inculcates certain kinds of response, so however we want to talk about it. We could think of the kind of fire that consumerism lights up in us with all of the desires as a kind of gateway to more desires that might be actually more interesting and more in sync with other life forms. When you think about the universe as a flow of energy,

01:12:59

then that simply changes your whole perspective about what it is to be alive. All living systems require energy as individuals. If we think more strategically about how we're using the planet's energy, life would be better for every living thing. You know, individual behavior can emerge as something different at a different scale. Emergence is sort of interactive. We don't need 24/7 access to energy.

01:13:30

We need 24/7 access to feelings. If we can just approach each other without the sort of condescension that comes way too often when we come to environmental topics, and say, all right, so we're looking for something to work. One of the important aspects of the evolution of cooperation is the development of complex moral emotions, so sympathy, empathy, compassion,

01:13:57

and these are the key. I think this is vital to our understanding of the human condition. The morphological adaptations that we have are simply reflections of where our ancestors arose on the planet. How much sun did they get, how much oxygen was in the air? These determine the shapes of their skulls, the color of their skin, but it has nothing to do with the inherent essence of what it means to be human because we're all the same species. [Command] Ignition sequence three, two.

01:14:27

It's been a pretty wonderful journey for mankind, but, boy, what a wonderful set of issues to have to wrestle with, going forward. We don't even have to get to Alpha Centauri to find these issues and learn about ourselves. It's about how do we look at longterm problems. Can we embody the wisdom that we feel's inherent here and move into the future wisely?

01:14:54

[crickets chirp] In our council at Onondaga, when we looked into the future, we address ourselves and say Swyonisu. Across the fire. Swyonisu And I asked one of the old chiefs, my uncle, I said, what does that actually mean? And he said it means the leaders, I said no, what's the real, literal translation?

01:15:24

He says it means you who look far in the future. [Command] Now, the lift off. With this, it's gonna be made here, the eagle has landed. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, pursuing the next step in the evolution of our knowledge, when he returned from one of mankind's greatest engineering achievements, stated, "I felt the successful lunar landing

01:15:52

"might inspire men around the world "to believe that impossible goals are possible, "that there really is hope for the future of mankind." We are living in the future's past. The relative odds of future outcomes change every second. The world we all live in is not larger than the sum of its parts. [birds chirp]

01:16:21

Each part is neither the center or the edge. It's a bustling world, a household of beings. Colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over which we have influence, but, in turn, influence us. Physical realities exist, regardless of our desires. Seemingly insignificant actions taken collectively

01:16:52

have led us to this moment. [gentle instrumental music] Everything is a system of relationships, and it's not easy to see the connections. The connections between the paint on a barn, the indifferent asphalt, a press conference, or to see the invisible links between human expectations, human vulnerability,

01:17:27

human memory, and the fragility of life itself. No, it requires effort. Energy comes in many forms. It's both the means and the ends of all our pursuits. All of us held in the arms of the atmosphere. We don't have to be poets, scientists, superheroes, or saints. Each of us can think about how we think.

01:18:07

Could the solution we're looking for be inside us? We're humankind. Ingenuity is in our DNA, and we can visualize. What kind of future would you like to see? What are you willing to contribute towards creating that future? Ask yourself, what am I willing to do? And not something that requires more effort than you're willing to make, and not some small contribution

01:18:40

that just scratches the guilt itch, but doesn't get the job done. No, ask yourself, what am I willing to contribute that comes natural to me? Something that I can sustain until the challenge has been met. Something that fits into my life. My profession, my hobbies. Fits in with my relationships. Something that's a part of who I am. Yeah, you know, each of us, is unique.

01:19:13

Each of us has a gift, a strength that we can direct towards creating this world that we'd like to see in our future. That we'd like to see in our kids' and descendants' future. We love our kids, right? A quote from the religious philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, comes to mind. "After mastering the winds, the waves, the tides,

01:19:45

"and gravity, we shall harness for God the energy of love. "And then, for a second time in the history of the world, "man will have discovered fire." [gentle electronic music] [crickets chirp] [thunder rumbles] [birds chirp]

01:21:03

[insect buzzes] [wind whistles] [water splashes]