Hawaiian islands used to have several species of crows an they probably die diverge from those in the u. S. At least 700,000 years ago. So this is in a lot of ways a lot like the story of darwins finches where an animal arrived on, obviously, were not sure how exactly. But in very small numbers, and then species in different niches and able to survive in different habitat. But the difference is that in the case of the hawaiian crows most of the species died out after the first humans arrived, so whereas galapagos not inhabited till europeans arrived in hawaii, sea fairers arrived 1500 years ago. And already they brought with them a species like rats like the pacific rat that either outcompeted or potentially just ate up the young and the eggs of these crows so most of the species were already gone by the time europeans arrived. This is the last species that survived in to modern times. And it is native to the big island, island of hawaii and its been under terrible pressure both from habitat destruction, the hawaiian forest and introduced species. And by the 1980s, the population of alala so low that the state of hawaii began to take birds into captivity to try to save the species. And had turns out to have been actually quite fortunate because the last wild alaala seen in 2002. And the bird is now classified as extinct in the wild so this particular that youre looking at is named kanowi. He was born at the breeding facility which is on the island of maui and hes quite an odd duck as the saying goes. He was raised by people. And he doesnt seem to really selfidentify as a bird. [laughter] or o at least not as a crow not as a crow, one of the women who cares for him told me that he once fell in love with a spoon bill. So because of his, you know, lack of identification with other crows he refused to mate with the birds at the breeding facility so there are now about 100alala maybe more at the facility and roughly 50 females he had to choose from but refused to mate with any of them. And he is pretty old now in his 20s which is pretty old for a bird. And so for precisely that reason his genes are very important so couple of year ago he was transferred to the san diego zoo, where he came under the care of a reproductive physiologist named barbra durant and durant is hoping that he is going to provide some of his gametes so that she could rush over to maui and use them to art if i recallly inseminate one of the crows over there. Every spring when it is mating season, a durant you know who is a serious scientist, ph. D. Takes this bird on her lap. [laughter] yeah. And strokes him in a way that hes supposed to find extremely exciting. [laughter] an about a year ago i was out in san diego and he had at that point not yet delivered on this. But durant offered to introduce me to him. And he turns out to be a very charismatic sexually confused bird. [laughter] so he has this very spectacular cage, sort of almost like a suite how is that . And we could stand in it and he hopped over to us and it seemed to me that he definitely recognized durant and seemed embarrassed to see her. [laughter] yeah, that may be projection, of course, but he seems to maybe be embarrassed and durant had brought him some snacks. These little mice, hairless newborn mice which are known as pinkies theyre pink. So he hopped over to peck at them and crows are very smart birds as im sure you know, and they can imitate human speech and kanowi has a line he says i know. And it sounds a little bit demented, to me when he says that he sums up this very strange and sad situation we find ourselves in. Here we have this crow one of the very last survivors of his species, and people are going to incredible lengths to try to save up the species. Set up this breeding facility. Giving what amounts to hand jobs to crows. [laughter] and people really do care about animals. About what racials call the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures but at the same time were in a process of causing what has been called extinction with more and more species to the brink and more and more species over the brink. So kanowi situation brings together a lot of strands, his knowingness or knowing, i know seemed reflection almost on his own tragic situation. And i ended up ending the book with his story and he sort of is an emblem for what im going to talk to you about tonight. So what is the sixth extinction . Implication is there have been five earlier extengeses and that is exactly the case. So what youre looking at here in this graph is an analysis of the marines fossil records and theres a little bit of a complicated graph but baisktsly on the bottom of your left it is time before the present measured in millions of years. So 600 million years up to 0 up to the present. And where you see the big dips those are points when the number of marine families were looking at the marine record here only. Suddenly dropped. And if you remember from introductory bio a family is group above a genus so goes from there to attempt, and even one species from a family survived that family counts as a survivor. So at the species level, the losses at these points were much greater than is reflected in this graph. So these five major extinctions i should add many minor mass extinctions but these five major are referred to as the big five. And theyre simply moments when geologically speaking moments short amounts of time when the diversity of life on the planet for some reason plummeted. Two british paleontologists written a lot of on the subject anthony and paul wignal have described it as theres a significant proportion of the worlds biota in a geologically and significant amount of time. Another british paleontologist Michael Benton has used med tore of the tree of life during a mass extinction hes written vast flaws cut short as if attacked by crazed ax wielding madmen so the first of the extinctions took place at the end of what is known as the period that is 440 million years ago, and at that point, most of life was still confined to the ocean. So very little living on land. That was devastating event for marine life, but not for terrestrial life and there wasnt any fifth was 66 million years ago that was by far the most famous. S that the event that killed off the dinosaurs not just the dinosaurs but a lot of other groups most mammals an most reptiles, snakes for example, and also a lot of groups like tar areasaurs but i have a wondl illustration that i like. [laughter] and theres a pretty broad consensus that this was caused by asteroid impact so those guys are reacting to the asteroid impact. [laughter] so to say that were in a 6th extinction is pretty serious. And the reason that were in the sixth and some scientists will say were only on the verge of the sixth maybe we can prevent it still, and others would say were pretty deep into it already, is that were changing the world very, very radically, and very, very fast. Not unlike an asteroid. And, in fact, you will hear and i have heard a scientist say this time we human being are the asteroid. How are we doing this and changing the world on an asteroid like scale . Theres a lot of ways. But im going to just focus on three tonight. That is how were changing the atmosphere. How were changing oceans and how were with changing what darwin called principles of geographical distribution. So lets start with the atmosphere. Every year we humans are adding on order of ten billion metric ton was Carbon Dioxide from burnings fossil fuels you know this im not going to delabor it we drive our cars. We turn on our lights there are 7. 2 billion people on the planet right now. An it adds up. And what were doing when we burns to fossil fuels is were taking carbon that was buried urnt the earth over the course of hundreds of millions of years transferring it back up into the atmosphere. So were basically running geological history backwards at a very high speed were taking a process what took hundreds of millions of years to run and in one direction an running in the other direction many a matter of centuries an if you were an alien and you came to visit the earth you could conclude that what were doing that the fundamental purpose of society is to dissect this transfer as quick as poll to see how much we can get out of the ground and put up in the air and how fast we can do it. And if the aliens werent measuring this process they would say we were doing quite a good job. Were increasing co2 levels and hiewks were doing this once again were doing this once again from hawaii. From a place called observatory that is altitude of 11,000 feet on this huge volcanic mountain. Im sure most of you have seen this as the curve showing you atmosphere Carbon Dioxide levels measured continuously for over 50 years now. And what youre seeing on the y axis there is c02 levels an parts per million an there is time on the bottom there. And that tooth pattern is a seasonal component right, so in the winter when the trees of the Northern Hemisphere dropped their leaves, c02 levels go up, and when the summer when they put out their leaves and photosynthesis theres more plants and Northern Hemisphere summer, we get lower Carbon Dioxide levels. They take c02 out of the air and global co2 levels fall. And you may have read recently that c02 levels reach a new milestone 400 parts per million and that is true. Hay did. At the end of last winter briefly but they sense dropped again over the summer. Theyre now in that rising part of the curve that is a very recent measurement 296 parts per million an this saw tooth will continue in a couple of years from now and never go mete 400 parts per million and keep rising as long as we continue to put c02 into the atmosphere an we show no signs of this point of slowing down. And if we want to see how well were doing on this process, on a longer time scale, weve got to go back to ice core records. So what youre looking at here is a record of c02 from a famous ice core that was thrilled on antarctica. The whole ice sheet is layers and layers of snow, that were laid down year by year year bier and never melted. And as you can see here, youre looking at your left once again were going time is Going Forward from left to right. That is 800,000 years ago. In the left hand corner so that ice core goes back 800,000 years. And in these ice cores actually little bubbles of past atmospheres that scientists have figured out how to extraght and analyze and up and down patterns seeing c02 levels on the up and down axis there is up and down saw tooth things those are ice ages when c02 levels are low ice creeps down. All the way, you know, down here, and into places Like Washington state, and then creeps back up again. And there you see when people arrive the arrival around 200,000 years ago. So this is 8 glacial cycles and you can see that during that whole time during all of the 800 level the co2 levels never above 300 parts per million until recently and now rising what amounts it a vertical line straight up. And if you want to go even further back, you know then the ice runs out. But there are other ways of teasing out ancient atmospheres from the evidence that we have for example, from the shelf marine creatures that drop to the bottom of the sea and preserved for many millions of years and these methods are not as exact but they give us a pretty good picture of the past atmosphere. And it turns out if we want to find c02 levels that are higher than todays weve got to go back quite a long way. Probably around 20 million years ago to a period called the mia scene. Keep pouring co2 into the atmosphere the way we are we could reach levels you know by around the middle of this century. And if we keep on after that, we could reach levels not seen since around 50 million years ago probably by around the end of this century. And what is significant about this as all of you know is that c02 has Certain Properties that make a green house gas. Im not going to, you know, give you the Global Warming speel because you know it once again. This is very, very basic geophysics this Carbon Dioxide that it traps heat during the surface of the earth has been understood since 1850s so this wonderful contraption constructed back in the 1850s but a scientist named john kendall and he defined this machine because he was interested in looking at the property was different gases. And when he tested Carbon Dioxide he realized right away he found out something very, very important. Carbon dioxide is transparent in a visible part of the spectrum so lets light through and doesnt block light that comes in but partly opaque in the infrared part of the spectrum. Heat escaping from the earth and radiate back to space some of that gets blocked. And kendall once again in 1850s realized that was extremely important and that it kept the earth warmer than it would be if we had an atmosphere with no greens house gases. So that affect is often called the Natural Green house effect and it is critical it life as we know it, if we have no Green House Gases in our atmosphere our planet would be frozen and average temperature of about 0 degrees. So this has been understood for century and a half now, no news here. And if you know that c02 is heat trapping gas and you know were rapidly raising c02 levels all things equal you would expect average goal temperatures to be going up. Right . And, of course, that is whats happening. So this next light im going to show you is not a slide but it is a video made by nasa. And all you need to know to understand it is that as a color gets warmer you know what we consider warmer yellow and blue more cold, temperatures are colder. So this is a reconstruction of Global Temperatures going back to the 1880s done by nasa. Yeah, that is pretty dramatic so what does all of this mean for, you know, living things . Well, the icon of what it means to be, you know, an animal in a warming world has become the polar bear. Because polar bears, you know, hunt off sea ice which is very rapidly disappearing. But one of the points that i make in the book and it is now really not my point but a point made by the scientists that i went out with. Is that Climate Changes are likely to be even more devastating in the tropics. And there are couple of reasons for this. One of which is simply that the tropics are where most species live. So if you consider for a moment for example, trees. So canadas forest is largest intact forest left on the planet it covers almost a billion acres, and in that whole expanse theres only about 20 species of tree that you can find. Now, here were in a crowd forest in the andys in peru so youre looking down a ridge from the very high andys from about 12,000 pete. And some scientists here, scientist named myles soman works at Wake Forest University laid out tree plots along this ridge. At different elevations, and each of those plots is about 2 and a half acres exactly 2 and a half acres and in these plots you can get up to 100 different species of tree in just two and a half acres. So five times as many species as you get in a billion acres up in canadian forest that shows you theres a whole lot more species living in the tropics. And what theyve done in these plots is theyve tagged and measured and ided by species every tree with a diameter over o four inches. And this sort of leads to another reason why tropical species h as level and lose with Climate Change and much to lose as arctic species, that is that tropical species tend to inhabit these very narrow range, very, very specific climatic conditions so wz we were hiking down that ridge that i showed you before, myles said to me look, find a leaf. Find a leaf with an interesting is happen as we go down this trail. And watch it as we go down, and youre only going to see that this leaf for a couple hundred meters because that is the whole range of this tree. That is the only place youre going to find that tree. So theyre very well adapted to very, very specific conditions. And the whole point of his experiment an laying out these tree pods and measuring trees and tagging them is so see what happens to trees as andys warm and theyre warming very, very quickly. So to track the climate and climatic conditions most offing up the mountains by meters per year. Oval trees dont move, they get up and move but they do you know, put out seeds and then those seeds can survive at higher an higher elevations. And what they found, this experiment has been running for about a decade now and the earlier results some species, some species are moving fast enough to track the climate. But only a few. Most are not. And a lot are not moving at all. Theyre just sort of sitting there so these tree communities which had have tended to be very stable over time in the tropics because the climate has tended to be very stable, are going to break apart. Right, were going to have different trees moving at different rates. So what is going to happen to the creatures that are also adapted to living in these communities . Well that is a difficult question to answer. You know the insects, birds, mammals because it is really hard to tag for example an insect. Trees have the advantage, theyre easy to study because they stay in one place all of the time. But as myles pointed out to me, unfortunately were going to find the answer. Were going to find out what happens to these species because were running this gigantic experiment. And another question that arises in terms of what is going to happen to the tropics when you think about it. As all of these organisms move up slopes what happens in the tropical lowlands. Those are the warmest places on earth. They tend to have a lot of species there. But as everything is on the move, what is going to move into these tropical lowlands . Are they going to sort of empty out . We dont have an answer to that at this point. But unfortunately were going to find out. So Global Warming is not the only effect, though, of pouring a lot of c02 into the air. It has another very significant effect and perhaps some scientists would argue more significant effect. And that is what it does to the oceans. So here just are a couple of key facts about this. The oceans have absorbed about a third of this c02 weve admitted since the start of the industrial revolution. That amounts to about 150 billion metric tons. Every hour the seas absorb another million of c02 and the result is it increased by 30 . And that detail of this phenomenon which has become known im sure youve heard of Ocean Acidification are complicated and not beginning into the knity gritty of the chemistry but basically all you need to know is if you dissolve c02 into water it is an acid and you have an afternoon and you were drinking it. But it is an acid. And if you add enough to it to the oceans youre going to change their kem chemistry that affects a lot of Different Properties of the water. Potentially but one of the key things it does is that it makes it harder or at least more energyically demanding for organisms that build shell or external skeletons so Calcium Carbonate is assembled the way you assemble greens to make a cake and were making it nor difficult for them to do that. And lots and lots of different kind of organisms do this they calcify these are tiny marine organisms you cant see them with the naked eye and under magnification and seen in parts of the year an they turn this milky white color. You know very common shellfish or calcifier, clams and mussels. Star fish are calcifiers that is a very beautiful blue star fish that you see in on the Great Barrier reef and reef building corals are calcifiers, what happens when you make life harder for a lot of different organisms a lot of work to be done to answer that question. An important question because some are the very bottom of the food chain of the marine food chain. An up with of a big concern to happen with with coral reefs. They sport these incredibly vibrant, and diverse ecosystems whos been on the thriving reef knows so this is another place i went this the course of reporting the book. This is heron island down at it, that green spot is the lie island that is peaks above the reef that surrounds it. And researchers at heron island were trying to look at what is going to happen to corals, you know, as we continue to pour c02 into the water and corals are did sile you can break off a piece of the reef and glue it to a tile and put it in a tub and if it has what it needs, it will just sort of sit there quietly, going on doing whatever corals do. So in this case, theyre bubbling and there are corals and bubbling in Different Levels of Carbon Dioxide to intimidate different futures right and there are studies i should say there are many, many of these studies going on all around the world suggest that if we keep on a current emissions path then by around the middle of the century reef building corals cant keep up and wont be able to assemble this carbonate at the rate they immediate to. To keep reefs going and defectively stop growing and there are a lot of forces always working to break reefs down. A lot of creatures that eat away at it and wave and erosion reefs need to be grow in a sense just to be staying even. And this is a quote from some British Marine biologists who wrote a book, a whole book about the future of coral reefs. It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct. So another way that were changing the planet and this is the last that im going to talk it you about tonight is by moving species all around the world. Youre all familiar with species that have arrived. This one has been making a lot of news lately the asian carp it is not one species. But actually several species a name that is suggested to come from asia. They tend to be filter feeders and go through everything in the water column. Toss not good for native fish. He does pretty much what his name suggests. He bores into ash trees and usually the results are fatal for the trees. If you live in the northeast as i do you see these signs saying please do not move the firewood. That is to try to prevent the spread of this bug and a lot of the trees in the forest of the northeastern u. S. And missed midwestern u. S. Are ash trees so he is also a very worrisome relatively recent arrival. Not all invaders, not not all an Invasive Species are from europe. This is a zebra muscle also very voracious feeder. It has a nasty habit as you can see at sticking to every available surface in the eating everything in the water column. All of these species were transported by the bull from somewhere very far away and when i got to a new place they didnt have any enemies so they just proliferated. They did really really well. Species around the world often we do it purposefully and most of us probably have plants in our yards for example that are nonnative species and many people have pets that are nonnative species but even more often we do it accidentally so its been estimated that every day in the ballast water of our supertankers we are moving around 10,000 species. This is once again strikes us as pretty ordinary. This is just the way things are bad when you think about it its really something thats very new and unusual. Without a lot of help terrestrial species in the landbased species cant cross an ocean obviously or a marine species similarly cant cross the continent. This bringing together of species is another way that we are running geological history backwards and at a very highspeed. Around 250 million years ago all of the worlds land masses were sort of clumps together in this giant supercontinent that has been called pangea and then you know only to the effects of plate tectonics they broke up and started to drift apart and to form the world as we know it today. And by bringing together, by transporting the species in bringing together these lineages that have been separately, living separately for tens of millions of years we are effectively bringing these continents back together again and biologists have termed this the new pangea. We are creating the new pangea. Not all of the species we bring together obviously have disastrous consequenconsequen ces. In fact the vast majority probably dont survive in a new place and then there are many that survive but coexist in relatively peacefully with what is already there but if you are moving so many species thousands and thousands of species around the planet every day than even if a tiny proportion have a disastrous effect than those disastrous effects are going to start adding up. So this is the panamanian him golden frog. It used to be considered a lucky symbol and panama. Its a very beautiful frog as you can see. Technically its a toad that we will call it a fraud. Very poisonous and thats why it can be afford to be so bright to stand out against the forest floor. It is a lucky symbol and used to be printed on lottery tickets in panama but then i guess around 10 years now, maybe more, 10 or 15 to frogs in panama just started to disappear and people eventually figured out that they were disappearing a link to a disease that is known by the shorthand bd which has a much longer latin name that is harder to pronounce. Dd is a fungus, its caused by a fungus and has appeared in a lot of disparate parts of the world, in Central America south america and australia and in europe, more or less at the same time and that is a pretty clear indication that it was moved around by people. No one knows exactly how that one of the theories is that it was moved around on a frog called the african clawed frog and whats interesting about the african clawed frog it was used back in the 50s as a pregnancy test. If you injected african clawed frog with the of a pregnant woman that frog will lay eggs in a few hours. Obstetricians used to keep tanks of these frogs in their offices. Yeah and then a lot of them, people dont know if people got tired of them or whatever and they let some of them go so now they are naturalized part of the population in different parts of the world. African clawed frogs carried this fungus but they dont seem to be affected by it so thats one theory of how we might have transported this disease around the world. Its not clear if that is a correct theory but is one theory. In a way was saying people realized this was what was killing the frogs in Central America or one of the things i was killing frogs in Central America and in this particular case they would literally watch this fungus moved east killing the frogs moving in an easterly direction so some scientists in 2006 an american panamanian him scientistscientist s try to get in front of this disease and tried to save a population of panamanian him golden frogs. They forgot to this area in central panama but they live in some biologists scooped some of the sum of them out of the rain forests to preserve a remnant population and at that point they had nowhere to put the frogs. The frogs quite literally ended up living in a hotel. [laughter] yeah. But then they rushed its the Amphibian Conservation center and this is one of the few places where you can still see panamanian golden frogs. They are now classified as extinct in the wild. So this is where i begin this book, with the story. I worked my way from the end of the book to the beginning. I begin with the story of the panamanian golden frog and the wonderful story of what is called the frog hotel. In some ways you could say that this is a heartening story. It shows that people really are concerned about other species. Once again to use Rachel Carsons phrase about the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures and in the course of reporting this book i spent a lot of time with people who have really devoted their entire life to this problem. A lot of them scientists like our bread durantz who ive mentioned with cannoli but a lot of them also ordinary people. For instance when i went to the conservation, Amphibian Conservation center there were a lot of volunteers in the states who are down there to help and when they took their frogs out to the rain forest and put them in the hotel they needed people to collect food for them to go out literally into the fields and collect bugs for them and people from all over the world volunteered. They got themselves over to panama and they volunteered their time and basically their resources. Even people who are not part directly of efforts like this, gave lots of money to groups like the World Wildlife fund, defenders of wildlife, National Wildlife federation groups that do really great work. I would like to be able to and on that sort of up the note and to say you know that what is going to make a difference here, we need to get even more people involved in efforts like that. But that unfortunately wouldnt really be true to the book. One of the central points of the book and in my talk tonight is that caring is not really the issue. It doesnt really matter how we feel about this. It doesnt matter how much we are concerned about it. What matters is that we are changing the world. That is what makes us comparable to an asteroid. And unless and until we confront that we are just a world changing force and im afraid we are just not really confronting the problem. Thanks very much. [applause] all right folks we have about 15 minutes for questions so we would like to get through as many as people as we can. Please keep it brief and in the form of a question and if you would like to ask something please come to one of these two microphones on either side of the stage. And your talk of extinction you left out one species that is sitting here tonight and i wonder if you might say anything about that. Well people do seem to be very concerned about the fear of people and i understand that. As i say in the book some of my best friends are people. [laughter] i want to say that i very consciously and pointedly if you read the book of boy talking about that. But i guess there are two ways to look at it. The first is if you had to pick an organism that seems to do really really well living with people it would be people. We seem to be really quite good at basically taking over the resources, the niches, the habitats of other organisms and living there. We live on every continent and every kind of habitat so we are really adaptable and very clever creatures. If i were betting on a species to sort of survived i think i would bet on humans. But, the other answer to that is that one of the lessons of the fossil record and its really one of the reasons why i do look at and spend a lot of time in the book and looking at what can we learn from these past mass extinctions is past six successes no future of future success of the dinosaurs were incredibly successful animal that dominated the world for tens of millions of years way longer than even our most distant relatives have been around. So when the rules changed and we are changing the rules, we are doing that right now, you dont know where things are going to end. So those are two somewhat complementary answers but that is sort of the best i can do. See how serious a problem do you think the spread of foreign genes from the gmo crops to other plants such as the dt genes and roundup resistance . Well, i mean the short answer to that is i dont know and the longer issue is that there are couple of different issues involved there. One of the big stories that has come out just in recent weeks for example is that a lot of the gmo crops in the midwest that have been modified so that they can be withstand heavyduty herbicides, its not the crops that are doing the damage. Its the herbicides that are killing off the milkweed in the midwest and that has led many scientists believe to this really traumatic plunge in the number of monarch butterflies. So there are all sorts of issues that radiate out that are not necessarily having to do with the exogenetic makeup of the crops but what we are doing, why are we genetically modifying these crops . What sort of chemicals or we been using that have effects on different species that depend on the plants that we call weeds that they need them to survive. There are a lot of issues in their and i dont on not enough of an expert to unpack all of them. You brought up this issue of people caring and said that wasnt enough which i agree with but i guess the question im asking is what you think really is causing this whole situation . The Climate Change and the destruction of species etc. . It seems that whole question of humans caring, there is tremendous sentiment to stop this destruction to interact in the entirely different way but i feel like its really limited and controlled and squashed by a system that operates in a totally opposite way that it is just driven by profitability and competitiveness. Im wondering i think theres potential for people to live in an entirely different way in relationship to nature to actually be caretakers of the planet but its really restrained and controlled. I wonder what do you think the solution is . Well, another point which i didnt get into in tonights talk but which id do get into fairly extensively in the book is the question of why did we begin this project. When people look back for example in north america we used to have a lot of fantastic creatures that arent here anymore and having been here for many thousands of years so its not just a recent phenomenon. Once again there seems to be a lot of evidence that the very early people to reach north america did have a lot of these creatures that were here and if you have a slow reproductive rate to sort of didnt survive early contact even with the small number of people using very simple what we would consider to be very simple weapons. So people are this unique creature who can innovate in ways that are much much faster than other creatures can adapt to and i am sorry to say and im sad to say that seems his d. Something we have been doing for very long time and it is now ramped up incredibly. Our discovery out how to use fossil fuels with the fact that they are 7 billion of us on the planet and i dont want to say that there isnt a way that we could be doing things a lot better because there obviously is that the question of whether its 7 billion people on the planet we are using a lot of the resources that other organisms used to use. The question of how we sustain ourselves and also all these other creatures is a question that i want to say i have yet to see someone provide a good answer for and im sorry to say that i can provide a good answer for tonight. Thanks for a wonderful talk in or your wonderful work. I hope you dont mind a rather personal question. You have taken a very close look at Climate Change and biodiversity which are pretty grim subjects. You are a parent and like all of us who are parents you have a deep stake in the future. How do you keep from despair . Well i think that once again i could answer that a lot of different ways and publicly may be the most honest way is that everyone sort of compartmentalize his and people do all sorts of people work in Emergency Rooms and they work with people who are dying and suffering and they go home and they play with their kids. We all have the ability to sort of sees certain dark truths about life in general and also to lead our daily lives. Maybe that is part of the problem with all of this but that is certainly true with me too. I think this material is incredibly sobering but its not necessarily in a more sobering than what we know about humanity for a long long time there have been many dark episodes in the life of our species and we sort of kept going. My grandparents were refugees from nazi germany and they kept going so you know thats [laughter] [applause] thank you for a wonderful talk and i think you were giving an interview for npr and you said by the end of the century a lot of our Large Mammals will be extinct which is a very scary thought and when you think about it it does really scare me to bits. But i came up here to say that if you look around the room im pretty sure everyone in here has been to high school, finished high school been to college maybe, had a good education. How are we going to fix our planet if we cant fix our own species and we have so many of the worlds population sitting in poverty and want and need and famine and war. How are we going to help our planet if we have little children having to walk miles and miles to get a basin of water or scrape food off of the grantee eat. So what do you think ,com,com ma my question would be how are we going to move forward . How are we going to do that . What do you think . Well i think these are the questions of our century and beyond because there are tremendous issues obviously of global equity. This is one of the real, one of the issues at the heart of trying to mitigate Climate Change is, those of us in this country and in the developed world who created the problem to a large extent. Its going to be born by a lot of people who did pretty little to contribute to it and what is it fair and at the full way to deal with that. I believe we do not claim we are going to deal with it fairly or equitably. The question of how we can improve the lives of people who are now living in poverty and at the same time trying to preserve those many other species that depend on and are not using all of their resources is in question and as i say im sorry to keep saying i cant answer it but i cant answer it but i do think it is a question that will occupy us for should occupy us for the rest of the century and it will impact john as more and more i think. Both the inequity of art global system and what we are doing with other species i dont think this situation is just going to continue on as it is right now. Two more questions. Thank you for your book and your article a couple of years ago. Can we anticipate and thats not the right word, a sudden extinction of events that may help tell the climate story and the way that weather events have begun to help . Thats a really interesting question and i dont know the answer to that. Its sort of like be careful what you wish for, thats for sure. I dont know the answer. Its a good question and i just dont know the answer. Thank you for your presentation. I had a couple of questions. One of them, during the presentation you were saying that different scientists talk about how deep we were in this situation. What do you think about that . You think we have taken a step too far and its a reversible . You know if you simply look at how many species have we already driven to extinction and how many are on the verge of extinction right now you say well, this is a pretty serious situation but its not the death of 75 of all species on the planet. But when you look at you now sort of realistic scenarios for the rest of the century and how much we are going to pour into the water and things like that and how much global population is going to increase and how many resources people are going to use. Now we dont know whether those scenarios are going to come to pass. Then you say well, that is taking us into some pretty dangerous territory. Then if you project out and out and once again the longer out we go the more and more uncertain our projections will become but people who have looked at for example things like measuring the rate at which categories and threatened junior extinct in the wild and then extinct would say the rate at which these things are happening suggests that we are in a very major extinction event. People are trying to look at different ways for calculating that and have come up with different answers. I honestly cant tell you where we are in that process. Its one of these things where many millions of years whatever looking at the fossil record will know but it will be very difficult for us to know while doing it. So at the end you said caring isnt enough. We actually have to manually make a change but earlier on you were saying that some leading factors towards the sixth extinction warehouse 7 billion people on the planet were using lights and driving and such. Do you think, do you think that us manually making a change would make a big enough difference so as not to be impacted by all of the lights and cars and stuff . What i was trying to say by that is just that our good intentions are not enough. We really need to confront. You know even at the point where something is on the verge of extinction thats a very noble thing to do and i really admire people spending their lives doing that but we really need to confront you know the root causes as it were of whats going on. Those are as i hope i indicated our really big and there are many. There is in just one. It isnt just Climate Change and fortunately. Its a host of ways in which we are changing the planet on a geological scale, so much so that you have probably heard discussions of geologists thinking we should rename the time we live in. We officially live in the hollow cm which is the time since the last ice age and we should rename this the answer pizzie after people because people have a place. The great forces of geology in the past. These are really big things and its not a matter of spending more time helping animals or even donating more money. Those are all good things to do and i really do recommend them but its a matter of trying to get our minds around all of these really big ways in which what we are doing seems really ordinary is just changing the planet on a permanent basis. Thank you. Thanks a lot. [applause] he ladies and gentlemen if you would like to get it looks science to align up right here in front of the stage. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] next on booktv pulitzer prizewinning david brion davis. In the final volume published 38 years after the second installment the author focuses on emancipation from the importance of the haitian revolution to the American Civil War and its aftermath. This is about an hour. Welcome. I am mark weisman and