How humans save nature | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxMarthasVineyard

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Can humans save nature? In this fascinating look at our relationship with the natural world, author and environmental policy expert Michael Shellenberger argues that a bright future is possible -- if we take the right steps now.

Michael Shellenberger is an American author, environmental policy expert, and the president of Breakthrough Institute. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment (2008), winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, co-editor of Love Your Monsters (2011) and co-author of Break Through (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and The Death of Environmentalism (2004). He and his co-author Ted Nordhaus have been described as "ecological modernists" and "eco-pragmatists".

Human beings have done amazingly well
over the last half century.

In 1950, there were just
two and a half billion people on earth,

today there's more
than seven billion of us.

The percentage of people living
in absolute material poverty has declined,

from around 85% in the early 1800s,

to just around 15% today.

Everywhere infant mortality
has been going down,

and almost everywhere
people are living longer lives.

Unfortunately, all of our success

has come at a high cost
to the natural world.

The number of wild animals on planet Earth
has declined by half since 1970.

Why do we care about the fate
of the remaining golden monkeys in Rwanda?

After all, we'll also be
as materially rich if they're gone,

and live long lives.

I could try to make up a rational reason,

but for me, after spending a morning
with this mother and her baby,

and looking at them now,

looking at the way the mother
is looking at her baby, her eyes,

the way the baby is looking at the world
with that curiosity and that excitement,

it touches something
deeper in us than rationality.

Couldn't we say the same thing
about the children of Rwanda?

After all, we don't know them,
we are not Rwandans,

but we care deeply about them,

and we don't want three billion people
to continue to rely on wood

and to be trapped in poverty.

My name is Michael Shellenberger,

and I'm president
of Breakthrough Institute.

We're a research organization
that's committed to a big goal:

lift all humans out of poverty,

and return more of the Earth
to wild nature.

Over the last few years, we've been
focused on a particular question:

how humans save nature.

That may sound like
a strange thing to look at,

given everything I've just mentioned,

everything we hear about the environment.

You might even wonder,
"Do humans save nature?"

The answer is that we do.

What we've discovered

is that we do in a way that follows
what turns out to be a hidden pattern,

with specific elements
that are really true around the world

at different moments of time.

One of the things we found is
there's a number of trends

that are actually going
in the right direction on the environment.

If we take the right actions today,

the overall size of the human population,

and our overall negative impact
on the natural world,

could peak and decline
not by the end of the century,

but within a few decades.

But, there's a catch,

and that's that we will have to confront
some deep-seated fears

that we have about the world,

and we will have to confront
some important misconceptions.

To begin, if there's one thing
I want everybody to remember,

only one thing you get out of this talk,

it's that humans save nature
by not using it.

And this may sound strange,

because it seems like we're always
using nature in some ways,

but what I'm definitely not saying,
what we've definitely not found

is that we save nature
by using it more sustainably.

Our research suggest is we don't save
nature by using it sustainably,

we save nature by not using it.

What do I mean? We'll take a closer look.

Humans use about half of the Earth,

half of the land surface of the Earth,

the part of the Earth that's not
under water or under glaciers.

Of that half, about half
of the human impact is meat,

or 24% of the Earth surface,

and another 10% is crops,

another 9% or so is for wood production

- and this is really amazing -

just 3% of the Earth's surface
we use is cities and suburbs,

for the place that we live.

What's important about that

is that now half of all humans,
three and a half billions of us,

live in cities and suburbs,

and this will prove to be a crucial part
of how humans are going to save nature,

and how our negative impact
will peak and decline this century.

You can see that it's the part
of the Earth that we don't use,

that we leave to wild nature.

So, let's take a closer look.

I've mentioned there are three ways
in which humans save nature.

The first is we save it by not needing it.

I said before that we
save nature by not using it,

but we only don't use nature
by not needing it.

What do I mean?

Many of you know that here in New England,

including in New Bedford
and much of Massachusetts,

whaling was a huge industry
in the early 1800s.

Mostly we hunted whales for their oil.

We used their oil as energy
to light up our lamps.

Then something happened,
some of you may know what happened,

around the middle of 19 century.

This cartoon in Vanity Fair Magazine,
I think, says better than any.

It's a celebration, it's a party.

You see the whales are dressed up
in tuxedo's and ball gowns,

and it's in 1861,
and what the caption says is:

"Grand ball given by the whales,

in honor of the discovery
of oil wells in Pennsylvania."

We save nature by not using it,
we save nature by not needing it.

We didn't need the whales anymore,

we had a better substitute,
it was kerosene,

made from abundant and cheap petroleum.

We didn't save the whales
by using whales more sustainably,

we didn't save the whales

by having more efficient lighting
to burn the whale more efficiently:

we saved the whales by not hunting them.

This is New England in 1880.

There was only 30% of it
forested at that time,

most of the rest was farmland.

This is New England today, 80% forested.

Martha's Vineyard was really
a large sheep farm in 1900,

today it's mostly forested.

When you fly over it,
you can see the beautiful forest.

Yesterday I saw a wild osprey,
several wild osprey.

In New England and much of the rich world

nature is returning, the forests
are growing back. Why?

These farms mostly went bankrupt,

we mostly didn't need them
for their land anymore,

we became more efficient
at growing more food,

we grew more food on less land,
we saved all of that nature,

allowing forests to grow back
because we didn't need it.

Look this amazing photograph of Hong Kong.

Look this beautiful green forest
that surrounds Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is only able
to save that beautiful nature

because it doesn't need it
for growing food

or for using it for energy.

They've made an incredible city,

and people say if you go to the city
you'll be alienated from nature,

but look, they can walk
into the nature from Hong Kong.

Nature is right there,
they have wonderful access to it.

This is an important part

of how the human impact on the world
will peak and decline in a century.

More of us are going to move to cities,

and we're going to return
more of the Earth to nature,

and wild nature in particular.

You may wonder:
that sounds nice for Hong Kong,

but what about poor countries?

What about developing countries?

What about all the slums?

Isn't this really about industrialization,

about factories
where conditions are terrible,

and people are treated miserably.

That was certainly my view.

Twenty years ago,

I was involved in efforts to hold Nike
and other corporations accountable

for their labor practices
in other countries,

particularly in Indonesia.

It was a successful effort,
and Nike did make some improvements,

but twenty years later
I wanted to go back,

I wanted to see what
had happened to the workers,

had their lives really
improved materially?

I met this young woman,
her name is Supartie.

She is from a rice-growing village
in the countryside.

After high school, she decided she wanted
to join her aunt in a suburb of Jakarta,

and work there in one of the factories.

She got a job in a barbie factory,

making clothes and cutting the threads
off the barbies, and it was terrible.

She was verbally abused everyday,
she went home crying every night,

and she did something
extraordinarily brave,

and that's that she quit.

But she didn't want to go back home,
she didn't want to be a rice farmer,

she wanted a better life
for herself from the city.

She struggled but she found another job,

and she found a job
in a chocolate factory.

She's become an extraordinary
labor activist and woman's right activist,

and when I met her, she was
very positive about her future.

She has two cellphones,
she has a motorcycle,

she just bought a house,

she makes four times more money
than the people back in the village,

farming rice.

She's now saving money
to send her parents to Mecca,

which is a dream of Muslims
around the world.

This is what's happened:

since 1960, we're growing much more food
on much smaller amounts of land,

it's one of humankind's
most extraordinary achievements

with great benefits to the natural world.

We use half as much the land,
per person globally, to provide our food.

That's only possible, it's only possible
for Supartie to live in the city,

as long as she doesn't need
to make her own food,

and we're making more food
for more of us.

Before he died, Jacques Cousteau
had a similar vision for the oceans,

he knew that a rising human population,
a rising consumption,

would put enormous pressure on wild fish.

Wild fish is the last set of wild animals
that we in the rich world still eat.

While fish farming is still early days,

it's still a young technology,
has a long way to go,

it's going to be crucial
to releasing wild fish,

and returning more
of the oceans to wild nature.

So the first way we save nature
is by not needing it.

The second way is
that we have smaller families.

I mentioned Supartie,

now that she's in a city,
she wants that life for herself,

she wants the freedom,
she can date who she wants to date now,

is able to love who she wants to love,
marry who she wants to marry.

I asked her about her family history.

Her grandmother had thirteen children,
her mother had six, and Supartie said,

sometimes she wants to have two kids,
sometimes she wants to have four,

by choice.

In the countryside a poor farmer

needs a lot of kids
to help him work on the farm,

needs a lot of kids
to help him in retirement.

In the city, you can
invest more in fewer kids.

That trend's consistent around the world

as women become more powerful,
more educated, as they have more income.

They're able to do more things
with their lives,

choose to have fewer kids.

You can see it right here,

even though the overall population
has grown from two and a half

to seven billion
over the last fifty years,

you can see here that we don't know
what's going to happen next.

You see, there's one scenario
that we keep going up,

and another scenario that we go down.

What will determine whether we go
up or whether we go down?

These are two different estimates
by two different leading demographers.

The high population estimate,

where it would go up to 16 billion or more
by the end of the century,

is a world of low energy,
wood energy, wood, dung and charcoal,

and large families,
mostly in the countryside.

A world where the population
peeks at eight and half billion

and then declines
by the end of the century,

is a world that looks a lot more
like what Supartie is living in,

with higher energy, smaller families,

more development, and more opportunity.

We save nature by having smaller families,

and moving to number three,

the third part of the three ways
in which we save nature,

to using more high-tech forms of energy.

This is Maiyishia.

She is one of the 900 remaining
mountain gorillas left in the world.

As a baby, she grew up

in Africa's oldest national park
in Congo, called Virunga Park.

In 2007, her parents
and much of the rest of her group

were killed by men
making charcoal for energy.

Since then, there's been a number of
well-meaning efforts to plant trees,

to help people in the region
burn wood more efficiently,

and the situation has only gotten worse.

We visited it in December of last year.

This is a picture of the park,
an areal photo that we took

high above the park.

You can see here, the fires in the park,

here, here, and here,
illegal charcoal burning in the park.

Why?

Because people need it,
they need that nature.

Over 90% of the people
depend on wood for fuel.

We didn't save the whales
by using whales more sustainably,

by using whale oil more efficiently,

we saved the whales
by using a different kind of energy,

by using a substitute.

This is Supartie.

Supartie, like young women who move
to the city everywhere, uses propane,

what we use as camping fuel,
similar to natural gas that we all enjoy;

it's an important substitute
for the two to three billion people

that still depend on wood
and dung as their primary energy now.

Propane is a fossil fuel,

and that means that as the poorest people
in the world gain access to modern energy,

we're on schedule to have
a lot of global warming.

This is from the Nobel Prize winning

United Nations intergovernmental
panel on climate change.

You can see historical emissions,

and you can see in the different colors
various possible futures.

You can see there are
different possible increases.

We could go to five degrees
above pre-industrial temperatures,

we could go to one degree
under pre-industrial temperatures.

It depends on choices that we make today.

This is Shanghai.

As more of us move to the cities,
we're going to consume more energy.

For everybody to live
at a moderate living standard,

a basic material-needs-met,

the world is going to need to triple,

perhaps quadruple the amount
of energy produced as from today.

If all of that energy is fossil,

we're going to see much more
significant climate change.

What are the clean energy options?
There's not many.

There's solar, there's wind,
there's a little bit of geothermal,

there's hydro-electric dams,

and there's nuclear power plants.

Solar and wind are wonderful;

I've spent much of my professional career
advocating for more solar, for more wind,

including the wind farm
off the coast of Cape Cod.

But solar and wind alone
cannot power Shanghai at night,

and there's a lot of exciting
development in batteries,

but we're so far away from being able
to power cities on batteries.

Geothermal is great where it's available,

and it's not available in many places.

Hydro-electric dams have mostly
been built in the rich world,

we've mostly dammed the rivers,
and even in places like China,

many of the rivers
have already been dammed.

That means we have
to take a second look at nuclear power.

When I was boy, my aunt took me
every August to Bittersweet Park,

where we would remember
the Hiroshima bombings.

We would light candles,
putting them on paper boats,

pushed them into the ponds,

and meditate over war
and morality and responsibility.

A few years later I saw a television movie
about the aftermath of nuclear war,

and in high school I saw
the documentary of Hiroshima,

about the horrors of nuclear.

I was anti-nuclear my entire life,

and then I confronted this data,

and the challenge of meeting global
energy and development needs,

and also dealing with one of our
most serious environmental problems,

and I've changed my mind.

In that time I've spent a lot of time
understanding the technology.

Fear is a really important emotion

it wakes us up to the world,
it makes us aware of risk,

but if we allow fear to drive us,

we can end up making up decisions
that actually put us at greater risk.

So it's important to understand
what the scare is,

it's important to understand
nuclear power.

This is a nuclear plant in California.

You can see it's a remarkable
piece of technology,

on what is the equivalent
of about three football fields.

Lots of surrounding green nature.

It provides power for three million homes.

You can see it's built up
three times higher

than the tsunami that affected Fukushima.

There's backup water
in case there is a power outage,

they can keep reactors cool,

These domes are containment domes,

which means that if there's a melt down,
no radiation will escape.

And you can see here all around it,
natural life, sea life exists,

because nuclear power is zero-pollution.

One of the things we've learnt
about energy production is

that from the environmental perspective,

you want the least natural resource in,

the least amount of fuel in,

the most amount of energy out,

and the least amount
of pollution and waste.

You can't walk alongside a coal plant
and not be affected by the smoke.

You can with nuclear.

It's a serious issue
in terms of pollution,

and what nuclear provides
is reliable power 24 hours a day,

7 days a week, to power
big cities like Shanghai.

What about the accidents?

We hear so much about the accidents,

and we've reviewed

all of the peer-reviewed
scientific literature,

independently done,
and here's what it shows you.

The first thing to keep in mind is
that four million people die every year

from diseases related
to inhaling wood smoke.

From three billion people that rely
on wood as their primary energy,

four million die
from respiratory illnesses.

This is a measurement of power plants.

Number one, the most dangerous
form of energy is coal.

They look at accidents and air pollution,

but the remarkable thing is:
basically all the death is in blue,

you can barely see the green line
up there, are from air pollution.

Petroleum, second best or second worst;

natural gas, an improvement; and nuclear.

I push the button and it doesn't come up,

because the number of deaths
is too small to register on this chart.

The former NASA climate scientist
James Hansen did a study,

using standard public health science,

and calculated that 1.7 million lives
have been saved by nuclear energy.

What nuclear does is it leaves
the fossil energy in the ground.

We save nature by not using it,
by not needing it.

With nuclear you don't need fossil.

What about the waste?

This is the waste
from Pilgrim Nuclear Plant,

which provides 14%
of Massachusetts' electricity.

A lot of people fear this plant,

a lot of people fear California's plant.

This is the waste,
it's just sitting there,

it's not hurting anybody,
it's not going anywhere.

We have a couple of people watch it.

People say: "Well, but that waste is going
to be around for ten thousand years."

If that were true, even if that were true,

that small amount of waste would be,
I would suggest, a small price to pay

for universal prosperity
and returning more of the Earth to nature,

not to mention the public health benefits
of zero-carbon power.

But, here's the thing.

That waste will not be around
for tens of thousands of years,

it may not be around
for several more decades.

One of the most exciting collaborations
right now between United States and China

is to develop the molten salt reactor,

one the first commercial reactors
that uses that waste as fuel.

95% of the energy is still
in the so-called waste when it comes out,

there's no major
scientific breakthroughs needed,

it's going to be a tough
technological challenge,

but it can be achieved.

Another team led by Bill Gates,

and another team of MIT engineers
are all working on the same thing.

There are actually other groups as well.

There is a global competition to create
the world's first melt-down proof reactor,

that also consumes waste as fuel.

Let's take a look
at the environmental impacts.

I mentioned that what you get with nuclear

is a small amount of fuel going in,
a lot of energy coming out,

a small amount of fuel and zero pollution.

This is how much land
we used for energy in 2010.

I mentioned that if we want to achieve

universal prosperity,
universal development by 2050,

we need three times,
maybe four times as much as energy.

If it was all from nuclear,
the energy footprint will actually shrink.

If it were all from renewables,

it would grow to be the size
of North America and Alaska.

So, let's do solar and wind,

but we can't just do solar and wind

and return more of the Earth
to wild nature.

How do humans save nature?

I mentioned there's a hidden pattern,

and it's specific and consistent
around the world.

It consists in moving people
out of their dependence on wood

and agrarian poverty;

moving away from large families
to medium-sized families,

choosing to have smaller families;

access to the modern energy
so that the forests are spared,

that forests can grow back
from agriculture;

and then you see the final
and the last important step,

moving toward small families, universal
prosperity, and nuclear energy.

What is this a vision of?

Today we leave half
of the Earth for nature.

Can we leave 75% for nature?

We're going to need more lands for cities,

but given current trends,
we can drastically reduce

how much of the Earth we use
for wood, crops, and meat production.

Can we do it? I think we can.

Why am I so confident?
Because we've done it before.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)