Arts
Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part two of two.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show today. We present part two of our interview with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. He's among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His recent research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding [00:01:00] and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In part two of the interview Norgaard talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. He also shares his thoughts on sustainability co-evolution and confronting a change in climate. Speaker 4: You've been very interested in them multi-disciplinary collaborative research model. Yeah, this is true. I've had very interesting experiences working in groups with people who think very differently [00:01:30] and I don't know when it starts. I guess probably the first project was a Ford Foundation funded project where eight or nine of us from different disciplines were set up as an Alaska pipeline team in 1970 the summer of 70 and we spent the summer talking to pipeline engineers to state officials, federal officials, scientists in the area, wildlife management people, native Americans, the Eskimo [00:02:00] about what's going on and as a team we tried to assess what's really the potential of [inaudible] Bay oil field for the state of Alaska and what are the myths, how do we break those myths and try to come up with a better understanding. Shortly after I came to Berkeley, Robert Vandenbosch from biological control entomology came into my office and said, we need an economist to work on pesticide use, and I didn't know anything about pesticide use other than what I'd read in silence swing by Rachel Carson and I [00:02:30] had an incredible experience working with Vandenbosch, Carl Huffaker, many, many anthropologists, but rather quickly. Speaker 4: Also just because there weren't other economists doing it. Found myself on a presidential advisory committee working with the council on environmental quality on pesticide policy, a working on on 19 University National Science Foundation Integrated Pest Management Project. And you get out in the field, you talked to farmers, [00:03:00] end up talking to the pesticide industry people and you learn a lot and you try to assemble it and try to change how things are working. So early in my career I got very involved with these interdisciplinary activities, but the, the strongest experience was just joining the knowledges, being on national academy committees with the former president of Stanford University whose names Donald Kennedy, a tremendous scientist that was able to work across [00:03:30] scientific fields with other people. But I was seen scientists involved in collective understanding or using their judgment together to try to say, this is what science can say and this is what society probably should do given what we know. Speaker 4: But it was a judgment process. It wasn't that there was a great big computer model that put all of our understanding together. And have you seen that process improving over time? I think there's more people participating in processes [00:04:00] like that. And the intergovernmental panel on climate change is certainly a massive experiment along those lines. And the Millennium Ecosystem assessment was one of these, we're doing it more. What we're not doing is actually teaching undergraduate students and graduate students that this is how science works when it really comes to understanding complex systems. It's a matter of getting in a room together and talking a lot and bringing your knowledges together. [00:04:30] And then that raises new questions that we can go back and study and do deeper research in small teams of maybe interdisciplinary or maybe it's strictly disciplinary, but it's that does my knowledge fit together with this other person's knowledge? Speaker 4: And if not, what does it mean? And if it does, great, you know, science does not come together. And if it did, who would know, who would be smart enough to know and how would we know that person knew? And so there's a great problem, you got to do it together [00:05:00] and we're not teaching that yet. I think the energy and resources group does, but it's not quite as explicit or as open as it should be. And is that what makes that program so distinctive? Well, I tried to leave that mark on it and had the advantage of serving on the admissions committee. And certainly one of my criteria was to bring people to the program who had enough experience to have a sense of identity [00:05:30] and a sense of voice, experiential knowledge that they could bring to the group, but also to not just take the most brilliant students we could find on the list that best matched the interest of the professors, but to actually try to select 15 to 22 students who could learn together, who had different understanding, who had different disciplinary backgrounds or experiential knowledge. Speaker 4: And so I literally tried to set it up as a shared learning to the extent I could. There's many people involved [00:06:00] in the, in the decision process, and of course the applicants this themselves have to say, yes, your best intentions are never carried out. But that was certainly an influence I tried to have. And to some extent did. And the book that you're working on now or I've just completed? Well, I just try authored a book, David Schlossberg and John Drysek. I have to say that they basically did most of the writing. We had try edited a handbook in Oxford Handbook on climate change in society [00:06:30] and so we decided we ought to build a write up a shorter book, a 200 page book that would be for lay people are educated obviously, but uh, a broader audience, a much broader audience. And the title of that is climate challenge society, right. And I [inaudible] wordpress. Yes. So I, I can say I contributed to the title climate challenge society and climate challenge in both ways that were having difficulty coming to grips with the concept of climate change. But we're also challenged [00:07:00] by the consequences of climate change and that books currently out. That book came out a couple of months ago. I have no idea how it's selling yet. I'm, I'm hopeful. Speaker 2: [inaudible] spectrums. Brad Swift is interviewing Richard Norgaard and ecological economists. Next segment. He talks about the book that he's currently writing. Speaker 4: [00:07:30] The book I'm writing now as the unusual title economism and the economy scene. And so elaborate on the first term economism. Uh, there's several ways to get into this, but you probably understand the difference between environmentalism and environmental science and that environmentalism is the movement. It draws on environmental science, but not as rigorously as it probably should. It doesn't mind using old [00:08:00] environmental science if that suits its purposes better. But environmentalism also feeds back on environmental science that environmental scientists needed speak to environmental ism environmentalist's and so they will choose words to speak to their public. We don't use the word economism. And the quickest way to say this, the difference between environmentalism and economism is that we don't use the word economism because there isn't any difference between economics and economists. [00:08:30] And they're kind of so tightly bound that we don't see the difference that, but economism is the beliefs we hold as a people. Speaker 4: And those beliefs help keep the economy going there. The ideas that are invoked in political discourse. You can think of it as just like we think of environmentalism as only kind of a religious movement or a movement that brings people their social identity. Economism is similar in that way that our economic beliefs help rationalize where we are in the economy [00:09:00] or economic beliefs. Help rationalize allowing our corporations to use cheap labor abroad or economic beliefs. Sort of explain how the system we're in exists and why it's there. Almost everything in our lives on a daily basis and to understand that we have economism that intertwines with economic sciences. Economists themselves are engaged in this belief system in partly perpetrating it and [00:09:30] partly changing it. So that's the nature of the next book, the second term as econo scene and he wrote a familiar, many of them audience would be familiar with the idea of the Anthropocene, the idea that we're now in a new geological era, an era in which people are the primary drivers of environmental change, and that's controversial among the scientific community, but it's begun to be used quite a bit. Speaker 4: And anthropocene to me is very vague. It doesn't [00:10:00] identify what it is. It's doing the driving. If you use the word econo scene, you should say, Nah, it's the economic system that we're in that's doing the driving and it's the economic system that we need to change. I mean we're not going to transform people. We're going to transform our social organization to solve this problem. And so econo scene to my mind is at least since post World War II is the appropriate term. As you look at the current economic system [00:10:30] you and mentioned earlier that the growth paradigm isn't really sustainable. Sustainability is a buzz word of the moment in so many areas. How can we define that and how do we pursue sustainability? I think we're so far from sustainability that it's very difficult to find and we're in this very difficult to understand very complex big system that has all these different feedbacks. Speaker 4: You know, the idea that we can comprehend sustainability is [00:11:00] like, can we comprehend the full environmental system? I don't think so. I think we have a strong sense that we're in a danger zone and we need to move out of it. And we know what directions we need to go. And that means slowing down the rates of material flows, slowing down the rates of energy use, slowing down the amount of toxic materials we're putting into the environment or pulling out of with the environment and transforming and releasing back into the environment. And [00:11:30] we have certain equity concepts that sort of says that those who are doing more of it should cut back more than those who are doing less of it. And I think as we move in those directions, we will see the system responding and we'll eventually get a better sense of sustainability, but we'll never really understand sustainability. Speaker 4: It's a really important word, but the idea that we can define it and get it all tied down scientifically and do it is now become part of our problem. But the idea that [00:12:00] we need to change and we know which direction to go, I think that's actually very clear within that change. Yeah. Does that relate to your idea of co-evolution? Is that sort of the basis of co-evolutionary thought or [inaudible] okay, so yeah, we haven't really laid that out. This was a thought experiment that I was in my own mind working in Brazil in the late seventies and I was very involved in sort of what's going on in the Amazon, gone onto [00:12:30] an Amazon planning team for Brazilian government and they were trying to optimally plan how things work, how could we develop the Amazon using science? And I was sitting there admits this process saying that's not the way development occurred in Europe. Speaker 4: That's not the way development occurred in the United States. There was a lot of experimentation and a lot of things didn't work and some things did work. Oh, that sounds like evolution at the time I was reading a lot of ecology and evolutionary theory and [00:13:00] was a friend of Paul aeroflex who was one of the cofounders of the idea of co-evolution species are primarily evolving in the context of each other, not to a fixed environment and what does that mean for how we think evolutionarily? And so yes, I began to try to understand or think about change in the human nature interaction in co-evolutionary terms. It's a pattern of thinking that sheds light on our predicament. But it's only [00:13:30] one pattern of thinking. So I don't say this is the answer, but it's very insightful. It's a pattern of thinking that says things are happening by experiment and that we should be experimenting more and be less certain about what we're doing. And what we've really done is set up a global system of everybody doing the same thing and we're not learning very much from it. And it's a very risky experiment. So I think if you understand change as an evolutionary process, you don't do what [00:14:00] we've done in globalizing the economy and trying to push that further and further and further. Speaker 1: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k Alex Burke. Our guest today is professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment, he talks about the need for increasing diversity and experimentation in the world's economies. Speaker 4: [00:14:30] So the idea that industries and enterprises should try to become sustainable becomes an experiment. We're always experimenting. We have sincere corporations that are trying to go green. We have corporations that are greenwashing. Everybody's experimenting. But is the system as a whole set ups and those experiments are giving us the diversity we need from a systems [00:15:00] perspective and we're not doing that. And is that much easier to identify in the biological realm rather than in the technology economic world of manufacturing. And um, if economists were actually going out looking at how the world works more than we do, we, one of the beautiful things about biologists, they go out in the field and say, oh look, that's interesting. Yeah. I kind of spend very little time going out and say, wow, this industry is co-evolving [00:15:30] with that industry. Isn't this interesting? We tend to sit in our offices and smash data rather than actually try to observe. Speaker 4: I'm obviously, it's very difficult to observe economic phenomena today, uh, cause there's just so much of it happening and it's not as visible as it was say in the 19th century when industries were just emerging. Certainly there are applied and practical economists that are born at this. How are firms we configuring, how are they relating [00:16:00] to each other in different ways than the economics profession is the academic economics profession. Yeah. I think if we were to be more field oriented we would see co-evolution and maybe you'd be able to draw on it and learn from that. In terms of trying to alter the economic system and the path that we're currently on, given the ideological polarization, do you see a way that that could happen with the current polarization? I have great difficulties seeing it. [00:16:30] The common element unfortunately is we all need our share of material stuff rather than a discussion about what's the good life and how are we going to go forward. Speaker 4: The forward for both of them is more, it's more at the tension over who gets what. Until we get to a situation where we get beyond the stuff and use of energy to what makes a good life. I don't see that transformation happening, but I'm hopeful that it's creeping up somewhere [00:17:00] that those discussions are going on and that'll emerge somewhere. Certainly there are people talking about those things. I don't see it at the center we have now the two centers we have now two, can we create a world in which nations become less in tangled and we can get more experiments between them and then have some sort of a learning way between those different nations so that we retain our flexibility [00:17:30] and don't put all of our eggs in one basket. I guess that's the experiment I'm looking for and does the approach to climate change and global warming, is that an opportunity for the same kind of experimentation? Speaker 4: It may be the disaster that forces us into action. I don't know if you call that an or not, but a opportunity or disaster. It's certainly testing how well we understand complex systems and change with those systems [00:18:00] and I'm hoping we'll find a way to to make this adjustment, but we're not doing it very well now. It certainly seems that they're trying to stay within the growth paradigm so far in your mind until they abandoned that on some level or completely it's not really gonna pay off by my mind. Then again, growth is kind of tricky. What we don't want is a growth of impacts. We want a decline. We want to simplify the ways in which we're interactive with nature. Minimize the footprint. That's one way [00:18:30] to put it. Minimize the footprint so that's not a matter of growth or no growth, right? You could still have growth in the arts. Speaker 4: We could all cut each other's hair every other day and charge each other and the GDP would look fantastic. GDP is a very deceptive numbers just to measure market activity. If somebody wants to call that growth, that's okay with me, but what we really need to do is simplify and be less intrusive in the natural system. Similarly, looking [00:19:00] longterm and coming up with an experimental framework. The delta program that you were talking about and the delta in general being a mysterious black box that no one quite understands. Do you feel that there's a growing acknowledgement within the policy community that it's going to take years and years and years and a very dynamic approach to solve it? I think that's true. The Delta Reform Act of 2009 [00:19:30] is very supportive of science. It mandates that we use adaptive management. You know, it's acknowledging that we have to change our management as the times change. Speaker 4: It's legislation that says climate change exists and we need to bring climate change into our understanding of how we think of the Delta as right in the legislation. I mean that's unusual, you know, at least in the state of California already in a world in which we are acknowledging the system is changing [00:20:00] and we need to change with it. There's real complications as to how you get responsible public action and responsible private action in a changing world and a predictable world. You can say, if you do this, then this will happen. If you don't do it, you're responsible and changing world responsibility is really hard to assign and we still want responsible government. [00:20:30] We still want responsible managers, we want responsible enterprises, but how do you set up rules which you know need to change. If you know they need to change, then our agencies or private parties allowed to adjust before the rules are changed. You give it to see the problem. Structurally responsibility and a rapidly changing world are in conflict. This means we need a dramatic [00:21:00] increase in trust and that trust has to be based on actual actions that are based in scientific understanding of a changing world. How do we build that trust? It gets back to how do we collectively understand and learn together and live as a community together in a changing world, it's pretty dramatic transformation. Speaker 4: How do you see academic work addressing some of these [00:21:30] societal problems going forward? Is there a role? Of course, and of course academia is constantly changing and where the learning is taking place is constantly changing within academe. I guess I'd like to go back to this. You know, we're not a university where multiversity and Clark Kerr wrote a book on that almost 50 years ago. Yeah. How to become a university again. How to become a model for the experiment. We're actually in of trying to collectively understand [00:22:00] a very complex system. I think universities could play a very strong role in making an effort to actually change the system and the system of learning among students, and we're not even talking about that yet. We're still very much in the fractured disciplinary mode and if anything, maybe with the greater need for corporate funding for rich individuals help even more show going into the [00:22:30] disciplinary mode rather than the collective understanding mode. Richard Norgaard, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great pleasure Speaker 2: spectrum shows are on iTunes here. This kid is simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. Speaker 5: Now a few of the science of technology events [00:23:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Vic, could I ski and I present the calendar on Tuesday, January 14th former NASA astronauts and Co founder of the B6 12 foundation. Ed Lou, well discuss protecting earth from asteroids. Why we may not see them coming at the Commonwealth Club of California, five nine five market street in San Francisco. Lou is pointed out that more than a million near Earth Asteroids are larger than the asteroid. That struck Siberia in 1908 [00:23:30] that one was about a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and it was only about 40 meters across, yet it destroyed an area roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay area. Lou will discuss his mission to detect and track the million with the potential to destroy any major city on earth and how his B6 12 foundation plans to build, launch, and operate a deep space telescope with an infrared lens. The first private sector deep space mission [00:24:00] in history and mission will be $20 or $7 for students. For more information, visit Commonwealth club.org Speaker 3: on January 16th Dr Tom Volk will present a talk on the hidden romantic lives of fun guy. Dr [inaudible] is a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse where he teaches courses on medical mycology, plant microbe interactions, food and industrial in Mycology, organismal biology and Latin and Greek for scientist. [00:24:30] Dr. Buck has also conducted fungal bio diversity studies in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, and Israel. His free public talk will be held on Thursday, January 16th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM and three 38 Koshland Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 5: Basics, the bay area art and science interdisciplinary collaborative sessions is hosting talks center reception with exhibits on our watershed. Over 7 million of us live near the bays, [00:25:00] rivers and creeks that comprise the San Francisco Bay watershed. Professor Jay Lund will highlight and explore the ramifications of the urban bay areas, dependence on water from distant sources, environmental artists, Daniel McCormick and Mary O'Brien. We'll discuss what they term remedial art, surveying some of their watershed sculpture projects and professor Sarah Cohen will introduce us to sea vomit and other species as she spotlights aquatic diversity [00:25:30] in the bay accompanied by a string quartet. The show will be on Saturday, January 18th seven to 9:00 PM with doors at six 30 it's at the ODC theater, 31 five three 17th street in San Francisco. Admission is on a sliding scale so you can attend for free. You should visit Oh d C dance.org to make your reservation Speaker 3: the years first iteration of the monthly lecture series signs that cow will be held on January 18th [00:26:00] Christian Reichardt or researcher at UC Berkeley will speak about his research on cosmic microwave background radiation. Much of it connected in the South Pole. Cosmic background radiation is our most ancient form of detectable lights and carries the imprint of the big bang. It has been a crucial tool and exploring the beginning of our universe. For the past 20 years, scientists had been mapping this radiation using telescopes located in the South Pole. Dr Reichardt will discuss what is already known about the Big Bang, what the latest results from the South Pole could mean and what it's like to work at the bottom of the world. The free public talk will be held [00:26:30] on January 18th in room one 59 of Mulford Hall on the southwest edge of the UC Berkeley campus. The talk will begin promptly at 11:00 AM a feature spectrum is to present new stories we particularly interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news. Speaker 5: Oxford anthropologist, Robin Dunbar is famous for formulating the so called Dunbar's number. That's the maximum number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships with and it's about 150 [00:27:00] people he's published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. This week. His article coauthored by Jerry Sarah Maki from Alto University in Finland and others reports on a study in which 24 students we're giving it an 18 month sell contract. Throughout the study, participants were given a survey to rank the emotional closeness of friends and family members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, greater emotional closeness rankings correlated with the frequency and duration of [00:27:30] cell phone calls. More surprisingly though was the number of people a person called and how much time they spent on the phone with them remained relatively constant. Even if the particular people they talk to May change. For example, the top three contacts typically get 40 to 50% of the time spent on calls. As new network members are added, some old network members either are replaced or receive your calls. The author's note. This is likely to reflect the consequences of finite resources [00:28:00] such as the time available for communication. That emotional effort required to sustain close relationships and the ability to make emotional investments. Speaker 3: A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used the inorganic material, vanadium dioxide, to create a micro sized robotic torsional muscle motor. The artificial muscle is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle of the same size. The device can also hurt all objects 50 times as heavy as itself up to a distance five [00:28:30] times as long as its own link faster than the blink of a human eye within 60 milliseconds. A paper describing the innovative machine and its use of material phase transitions appeared in a recent issue of the journal. Advanced materials, the material and the robotic muscle. Vanadium dioxide is highly prized itself because its properties change with temperature. At low temperatures. It acts as an insulator, but suddenly I 67 degrees Celsius. It becomes a conductor. Additionally, upon warming the crystal instructure, the material will contract in one direction while expanding [00:29:00] in the other two. The multi-functionality of the material makes it a prime candidate for use as an artificial muscle, as well as helping to improve the efficiency in other electronic devices. Okay. Speaker 1: And the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, [00:29:30] please send them to us. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this time. Speaker 6: [inaudible].