Utahs onfor sponsoring this session. Nautical he has won awards for several of his previous books including the World Without us which was named top Nonfiction Book of the year by Entertainment Weekly and time magazine. A lot of you probably know him from that. I have to say your book the World Without us was one of the most inspiring things that i ever read. You had people benign lead disappear and describe how cities and farms and rivers and mountain lions would revert to a more natural state. That book was translated into 34 languagess which means a lot of people found it inspiring. Countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth has already been translated, coming out with 15 foreign editions and more on the way. It is another top seller around the world which is no wonder since youve visited 21 countries to produce it. Basically, given your past success with World Without us and what you learned from that a lot of us are wondering what inspired you to write countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth . Thank you all for coming. Some of you do know the World Without us, i wrote that book because i really want the world with us. The idea of benignly removing the species to which we are all intimately involved was to show how when we relieve it, the daily pressures we keep on the planet, the earth rebounds in the surprisingly swift and wonderful ways, he eventually even refills empty nichees that we have inadvertently extinguished their president s. My hope was that people would see if this restored earth and wonder is there any way we can at ourselves back into this picture, only this time in nice harmony and balance with the rest of nature and not in mortal combat with it. The epilogue to that book was intended to be a discussion about how we might do that. But i ran into a rather disturbing fact and that is that if you see these figures on population, they are so big you cant get your mind around them but thanks to the invention of the calculator i did some Long Division by 365 and found out basically every four days we add a Million People to the planet. And this is not a sustainable number. At the end of that book i did this other little thought experiment which i hadnt even planned out. I asked the Democratic Institute of vienna which is one of the premier such organizations what would happen if setting aside all social concerns everyone participated in the chinese policy from then on and only had one child per family and it turns out suddenly they would go like this and by the end of this century we would be back at 1. 6 billion which was exactly the population of the earth in 1900 before our population suddenly doubled and then doubled again. We quadrupled in one century for reasons we will get into. I left that dangling at the end of the World Without us. The idea of how many of us is a safe population on this planet and is this something we should be talking about when we talk about how we deal with Environmental Concerns . I expected a lot of blow back. In stead what i got was an onrush of interest from a lot of readers. Everyone wanted to talk about this. Was on catholic radio programs, mormon utah. Everybody got the fact that things are more crowded than they were before. All these cities that are endless and all the smog. Finally i decided it is a really important topic but also a really explosive one and people get really passionate about it because religion and economics, growth, that is what makes our economy healthy. Theres a lot of stuff tangled up in there so i decided someone should really explores this product not as pro population control, that itself is a loaded word so we say population management or anti explore it as a journalist. Really research this thing and try to find out can we determine how many people the earth can safely hold without tipping it over . Can we figure out how much nature we need to preserve because we are starting to push other stuff off the planet at an increasing pace and at a certain point we will push something off we wont realize until the is too late we should have kept that one. Given that what comes to everybodys mind is that chinese one child policy and nobody likes including the chinese, are there other approaches . Is there anything in histories, the liturgies war experiences of the worlds vast swath of cultures that might embrace the idea of embracing so much in a time of urgency . And last, the one about economics, shrink to a sustainable size is a way to design an economy that will allow us to prosper . Without constant growth . Particularly that third question, the one about all the cultures etc. That is why i went to 21 countries for this book, starting in israel and palestine and ended in iran. Many of these topics you mentioned, want to come in to. I want to let you know we will leave some time for questions for for the audience at the end so if you have any you can think of but lets start out, not everyone considers population of problem. Given all the other problems applying for attention, why do you consider this a problem and how does it rank among the others . It is a problem that underlies all the problems. We wouldnt have been fine mental problems if one species hadnt grown suddenly so numerous that we are basically in the most abnormal growth spurt of any population in the history of biology and we dont notice it that much because we all were born in the middle of it and it looks kind of normal to us. Let me explain a little bit. First i should mention it seems so obvious when you think about this, most groups dont like to touch this one at all. The reason for that is really understandable because this is a topic that makes us uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. Like every other organism, we were designed to make copies of ourselves, we were designed to make extra copies of ourselves because sadly enough, most babies didnt make it to their fifth birthday. That happens throughout all natures so the idea was greatgrandmother might have had eight nine kids but maybe two or three survive the. Population grew very slowly, 99 of Human History, the line was like this. Barely more than two babies per woman were surviving. In the beginning of the 1800s just before vaccination for smallpox which would knock us off by the millions, was followed by other vaccines and all these understanding about pasteurization of milk, and we started to rise. We passed 1 billion in 1815 and then we got too little over 1 billion by 1900. And then two things happened in the 20th century that made the chart go like this and this is what it looks like, the classic hockey stick. What happened was right before world war i to two german scientists discovered a way to pull nitrogen out of the air and slather it chemically on the ground. This is the most significant invention in all of Human History because until that happened the amount of plant life on the planet was limited to what relatively few number of plants, nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots could contribute to this will but now suddenly we could contribute limitless amounts of nitrogen. We started being able to grow much more food. That meant people werent dying and they were having more babies and populations suddenly really started to rise. Then i remember in the 19 late 1960s a book called the population bomb came out, population then was at 3. 5 million, less than half of what it is today. They predicted that the dire philosophy and prediction of Thomas Robert malthus, when the smallpox vaccine was coming out, that population was going to out raise Food Production. It was finally going to come true, we were outstripping what we could do with nitrogen which is so significant by the way. 40 of us would be here would not be here without artificial nitrogen. They predicted that with the population growth spurt, and huge salmons would break out in the 1970s. In asia and africa. Unless an agricultural miracle took place. One did take place, the green revolution. You have all heard of it. The green revolution basically created grains that would prove much more grain than stock, rice and wheat. There was all this extra food, and it was where the fans were supposed to the most dire, pakistan and india and the famine were averted. Everybody who believed this was such a miracle said malthus was wrong. Everybody except the head of the green revolution. He won and Nobel Peace Prize credited for saving more life than any human being on earth and when he accepted that speech instead of gloating on that, we only bought time. He understood the paradox of food. The more food you produce the more people eat it, they dont die of starvation, they live to be get more people. He spent the rest of his life in population groups, he said unless enhance food population and conpopulation control come together we will be in a terrible situation. Would you like me to talk about indiana and pakistan . You call it global water torture going on. Okay. Two of the countrys i went to in india and pakistan, india is as a result of all these people surviving, is about to surpass in this coming decades. We will explain Pakistan First and come back to the indian situation. Pakistani is one of the fastestgrowing countries on the planet and is out of control as a result. It has close to 190 Million People now. It is about the size of texas. Texas has 26 Million People. The climate is around the same. By the million by the middle of this century pakistan will have 400 Million People. That is 85 more than the United States has today and pakistan will still be the size of texas. It cannot possibly employ all these people so you have all these angry frustrated unemployed and underemployed young men and guess what they become . Pakistani and nuclear power. This to me is pretty serious. In 1958 dwight eisenhower, former allied commander who was then president appointed one of the allied generals to look at over population. Over 3 billion people on the planet yet. Eisenhower then stated the single biggest security issue in the postwar era would be over population. The general appointed to that commission spent the rest of his life working on population issues. This is serious business. We all hear Great Stories about in thes economy but i went up to vote place where the green revolution was tried out and it was so miraculous. I met with the head of the green revolution there who explained to me that to grow all these crops relief fast, they did a lot of holes in the ground to get water which they then hit 50, 75 feet and it went down 250 and around 500 feet when it got so expensive to drill at the pump Indian Farmers started committing suicide and i spent a day talking to widows of green revolution farmers who no longer can afford to keep drilling below thousand feet to get to that rapidly depleting water. Since 1995 their farm union told me and i corroborated that, 270,000 green revolution founders have committed suicide in indiana and they do it symbolically by drinking pesticides. So the numbers have grown, the water is diminishing, the use of chemicals to force feed the land to get more food for us, this was serious stuff which is why i decided i had to write this book. In the midst of it all, i was watching as all of us now watch what is going on with the atmosphere and climate and i realized, you know, i have written a lot a lot about Renewable Energy. It is very encouraging we keep doing it but it is frankly a sin that this university doesnt have solar collectors on every single rooftop. [applause] there is a lot. Any hot water produced at this university that is in from solar energy which is really cheap to heat water, i stand by that comment. Nevertheless the uptake until we know will pull energy is not happening very quickly. 80 of our energy is coming out of fossil fuels and even if tomorrow all we did was build solar plants and wind farms, just the mining of the metals and the construction and all that it would mean several more decades of carbon we have to work off before we have zero emission is energy. I dont know what to do, theres something we can do about limiting the number of the manners of that energy and the matters of carbon dioxide. Right now there is more up the bears and there has been in 3 million years. 3 million years ago the seas were 80 to 100 feet higher. Interesting reconfiguration of our coastline unless we start taking control of it. Thank you. That is really important stuff. We have been hearing a lot about problems and we need to come back to those that cant you give us all little relief from Success Stories you found . Women have been having seven children or more and we are down to replacement rate. I am pleased to say, i went into it and it turns out that unlike Renewable Energy that we still dont know how to create it in massive enough quantities to run our cities and industries and vehicles and indiana and china, contraception is something we dont know how to do. This doesnt require a technological lead. Many places on earth i coming close to or actually below replacement rate. Replacement rate is simply two people with an average of two children and population doesnt grow and if they have fewer than population starts to reduce. There are several examples in countdown our last, best hope for a future on earth of countries that have done this without a coercive policy like chinas. Other than chinas and a brief epic of forced sterilizations in the mid 70s in india that brought down the government, all the ones in the book are non coercive and voluntary and one of my favorites is the one melanie mentions. In 1979, iran had its Islamic Revolution and immediately thereafter they were invaded by Saddam Hussein who wanted to grab this oilrich province on their border. The new government was unorganized, easy pickings. He also had the backing of nato which was not fond of the iranian revolution and he had a lot of sophisticated weaponry and even nerve gas which unfortunately some of our tax dollars provided. Iran just had people. So the Ayatollah Khamenei asked every fertile women to their patriotic duty, get pregnant to help a 20 Million Man Army to fight off the invaders and at one point as they were near the biological limit for females and reproduction as part of the high street production rate in the history of the planet. They held iraq to a stalemate for eight years. An economist and budget director of iran went to the Supreme Leader and said we have a problem. These kids will grow up 10, 15 years. Our economy will not be able to employ them all. Another pakistan. The ayatollah agreed something should be done. The new ayatollah who is currently the ayatollah still immediately issued a fatwa saying theres nothing in the koran that says if as he put it if wisdom dictates you have a number of children you can responsibly care for their is nothing against using any form of Birth Control all the way up to and including operations. Second, they made that stuff available throughout the country. There is of woman on the books, a developed muslim women i talked to in tehran who told me about horseback brigades they would have bringing surgical teams, and later by helicopter to the most remote corners of the country to make sure everybody had access to contraception. It was free. But it was voluntary. They had posters saying choose good. The only thing that was obligatory was premarital for couples which frankly this is not a bad idea. In those sessions which were held either in the moscow for health center, how much it costs to raise, feed, educate, clove children. Women didnt need to be told twice. The fourth and most important part of this, they encourage girls to stay in school because a woman who is studying tends to they fer her childbearing until her studies are done and when she is done she has Something Interesting and useful to do, economically helpful. He wants to be a mother but you cant do all that if you got 7 kids. Overwhelmingly everywhere i went, rich country, a poor country, you get a girl through a secondary school and on the average she will have two children or fewer and if we were doing that from now on, education is the best contraceptive, we would be coming down in the next two or tweak the generations to a sustainable number. You mentioned access to contraceptives and education for women as being key elements. Anything those of us as americans should know about that or might contribute . Maybe things we can help with projects . The most important thing. In country after country, i found you dont need to get government involved. This is an individual decision. In iran they told people have as many children as you want the people got the idea. I go to the vatican in this book and we all know the vaticans position on this and the vatican cant change that position because they her painted in a corner called papal infallibility. If there are any catholics in the room amino offense because i had an interesting conversation that you can read about and one of my great mentors in life was a Catholic Priest who is also in the book. The vatican which is this country that is 110 acres, a population of a thousand, nearly all the mail, surrounded by at a very catholic country called italy which has one of the lowest fertility rates, an Italian Women are some of the best educator on the planet. Per capita more graduate degrees among females than anywhere else. They just simply dont Pay Attention to the vaticans position on that more to catholics in the United States, 90 of catholic women in the United States heavy use or are currently using contraception. There is a case of just a country that didnt even have a program, but fertility came weighed down. But it takes getting co