Lot of you probably know him from that. And alan, i have to say your book, the World Without us, was one of the most inspiring things i have ever read. You have people benignly disappear and describe our the cities and farms and mountain lions would revert to a more natural state. That book was translated into 34 languages, which means a lot of people found its inspiring. And countdown already has been translated well, its coming out with 15 foreign editions and more on the way so its another top seller around the world, which is no wonder since you visited 21 countries to produce it. So, basically given your past success with World Without us and what you learned on that, im sure a lot of us are wondering what inspired you to write countdown. Thanks. Thank you all for coming. This is really nice. Some of you do know the World Without us. For those who dont, i wrote that book because i really want a world with us. The idea as she says benignly removing a species to which we are all intimately involved, was to show how, when we relieved over the daily pressure wes heap on the planet, the earth reboundses in surprisingly swift and wonderful ways, eventually refills empty nitches that we have inadvertently extinguished their residents. My hope was that people would see this restored earth and wonder, okay, is there any way that we can add ourselves back into this picture . Only this time, in nice harmony and balance with the rest of nature, not in mortal combat with it. So, the epilogue for that book was intended to be just a little discussion about how we might do that. But i ran into a rather disturbing fact. Thats you you see these figures on population, and theyre 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 i found out that basically every four to four and a half days we add a Million People to the planet. And this is not a sustainable number. So at the end of the book, i did this other little thought experiment, which i hadnt even planned on. I asked Demographics Institute in vienna, which is one of the premiere such organizations, what would happen if setting aside all social concerns, everyone participated in the chinese policy from then on and we only had one child per family. It turns out that in suddenly they would go like this, and by the end of this century, wed be back at about 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. So, i sort of left that dangling at the end of the World Without us. The idea of, how many of us is a safe population on the planet and is this something we should be talking when we talk about how to deal with environmental concerns. And i expected a lot of blowback. Instead what i got was just an onrush of interest from a lot of readers. Everybody wanted to talk about this. It was on catholic radio programs and mormon utah, and still everybody got the fact that things are more crowded than they were before, and, god, all these cities that are endless and the smog, and finally i decided, well, its a really important topic but its also a really explosive one, and people get really passionate about it because religion and economics, growth, thats what makes the world our economy healthy. Theres a lot of stuff tangled up in there. So, i decided someone should really explore this topic, not as overpopulation population control. That is a loaded word. So we say population management. Or exploder 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 . The converse of that. Can we figure out how much nature we need to preserve because were getting so numerous, were starting to push other stuff off the explant at a certain point well push something off we wont realize until its too late, oops, we should have kept that one. Given that what comes to mind, everybodys mind, is the chinese, one child policy, and nobody likes it, including the chinese. Are there other approaches . Is there anything in the history, the current experiences of the worlds vast swath of cultures, that might embrace the idea of so to speak, refraining from embracing so much in a time of urgency . And then last, the one about economics. Like, if we have to stop growing or even shrink to a sustainable size, is it a way to design an economy that will allow to us prosper . Without constant growth. So, particularly that third question, the one about all the cultures, et cetera, thats why i went to 21 countries for this book. I started in israel and palestine and ended in iran. All good stuff and many of these topics you mention in passing well want to come back ask delve into. I also want to let you know well leave some time for questions from the audience toward the end. So if you have any, you can think of them. Lets start out. Not everyone actually even considers population a problem, and given all the other problems that are vying for attention, how why do you consider the serious problem and how does its rank among the others . I think the problem that underlies all the problems. We wouldnt have environmental 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 really notice it that much because we all were born in the middle of it and it looks normal to us. Let me explain a little bit. Well, first, shy mention, it doesnt seem to obvious when you think about this and yet most environmental groups dont like to touch this one at all. The reason for that is really its really understandable because this is a topic that makes us uncomfortable. Makes me uncomfortable. Like every other organism, we were designed to make copies of ourselves. In fact 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 nature. The idea was, your greatgreatgreatgrandmother might have had eight or nine kids but maybe two or three survived. Population grew very, very, very slowly, through 99 of human history. The line was like this. Barely more than two babies per woman were surviving. But then, in the beginning of the 1800s, just before, a vaccination for smallpox, which used to knock us off by the millions, was invented. Followed by other vaccines and hygiene understand about antiseptics, pasturization of milk, and then we started to rise. We passed a billion in 1815. And then we got up to a little over a billion and a half by 1900. And then two things happened in the 20th century that made the chart go like this. This is the classic hockey stick. What happened is right before world war i, two german scienceties discovered a way to pull nitrogen out of the air and slather it chemically on the ground. And until that happened the amount of plant life on the planet was limited to what a relatively few number of plants, who had nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots and could contribute to the soil. Now suddenly we can contribute limitless amounts of nitro general and started being able to grow much more food, and that meant people werent dying, and they were having more babies, and populations suddenly started to really rise. And then youll remember in the late 19600s, a book called the population bomb came out. Written by paul and ann ehrlicl. The population was three 3. 5 million. Less than half of today. They predicted that the dire philosophy and prediction of Thomas Robert malfus, back just when the smallpox vaccine was coming out, that population was going to outrace Food Production, it was finally going to come true. We were even outstripping what we could do with nitrogen, which is so significant, by the way, 40 of us would not be here without artificial nitrogen. Thats hour important it is. They predicted that now with the population growth spurt, huge famines would break out in the 1970s in asia and africa. Unless an agricultural miracle took place. And unbeknownst to them, one did take place, the green revolution. The green revolution basically created grains that would produce much more grain than per stalk than ever before. Rice and wheat, corn. And then there was all this extra food. And it was tried out where the famines were supposed to be most dire. Pakistan and india. And the famines were averted, and everybody who believed that this was such a miracle said they were rom and malfus was wrong. Everybody sent e except for the head of the green revolution, he won the Nobel Peace Prize because he is credited with saving more lives than any human being on earth, and when he accepted that, instead o gloating over that, he said we have only bought time. He understood the paradox of food. The more food you produce, the more people edit. Dont die of starvation, live to beget more people, and he spent the rest of house life on the board of pom layings groups because he said unless enhanced Food Production and population control come together well be in a terrible situation. So, would you like me to talk about india and pakistan. I was going to ask that you call global water torture from some of the overgrowth. Okay. Two of the country is went to, of course, were india and pakistan. India is as a result of all these people surviving and begetting more people and is about to surpass china thats most populous nation on earth during this coming decade. And explain Pakistan First and then come book to the indian situation. Pakistan is one of the Fastest Growing countries on the planet and just simply out of control as a result. It has close to 190 Million People now. Its about the size of texas. Texas has 26 Million People. And the climates are the same. By the middle hoff the century, pakistan will have close to 400 Million People. Thats about 85 million more than the United States and pakistan will still by the size of texas. It cant possibly employ all these people. So you have all these angry, frustrated, unemployed and underemployed young men and guess why they become . Pakistan is a nuclear power. This to me is pretty serious. In 1958, dwight d. Eisenhower, former allied commander who was then president , appoint one of his allied generals to look at overpopulation, and there werent even three billion people on the planet yet. And eisenhower then stated that the single biggest Global Security issue in the post war era would be overpopulation. The general hoe appointed to head the commission spent the rest of his life working on population issues. This is serious business. India, we all hear these Great Stories about their economy. But i went up to the punjab where the green revolution was trade out and so miraculous, and i made with the head of the green revolution there, who explained to me that to grow up a these crops fast, they dug a lot of holes in the ground to get water which they hate at 5075 feet. And then went down to 150 and 250 and 500 feet when it got so expensive to drill and to pump, Indian Farmers started committing suicide, and i spent a day the punjab talking to widows of green revolution farmers who no longer can afford to keep drilling now below 1,000 feet to get to that rapidly depleting water. Since 1995, their farm union told me, and i corroborated this with the indian government, 270,000 green revolution farmers have committed suicide in india, and they do it symbolicallily by drinking pesticide. The numbers have grown, water is diminishing, the use of chemicals to force feed the lan to get more food for us, this is serious stuff, which is why i i decided i had to write this book. But in the midst of it all, i was watching, as all of us now watch, what is going on with the atmosphere and the climate. And i realized that, you know, ive written a lot about some of you read my book about Renewable Energy and its very encouraging and we have to keep doing and it its frankly a sin this university doesnt have solar collectors on every single rooftop. [applause] there are quite a few just so you know. Theres a lot. If theres any hot water produced at this university that isnt from solar energy, which is really cheap to heat water, i stand by that simple comment. Anyhow, nevertheless, the uptake on total Renewable Energy is not happening very quickly. 20 80 of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and even if tomorrow all we did was build solar plants and wind farms, et cetera, just the mining of the metals and the construction and all that, would mean several more decades of carbon we would have to work off but we had truly zero emission energy. So i dont know what to do about that. But i do know theres something we can do about limiting the number of demanders of the energy and emitters of the carbon dioxide. Right now theres more up there. Than there has been in three million years. And three million years ago the seas were 80 to 100 feet higher. Its going to do some interesting reconfigure racing of our coastline unless we take control of it. Thank you. Thats really important stuff. Now we have been hearing a lot of the problems and we need to come back to those, but can you give us a little relief with some of the Success Stories you found. You went to places where women had been having seven children or more and were down to replacement rate. Iran is a good example. Yeah. Im pleased to say i came out of this book more hopeful than when i went into it. It turns out that unlike Renewable Energy, we still dont know how to create it in massive enough quantities to run our cities and our industries and our vehicles and orinase and our chinese our indias and chinas on it. Contraceptions something we are already know how to do. Doesnt require a technological leap. Many places on earth are coming close to are actually below replacement rate. Replacement rate is simply two people have an average of two children. And, therefore, population doesnt grow. If they have fewer then population starts to reduce. Now, there are several examples in countdown of countries that have done this without a coercive policy, like chinas. In fact other than chinas and a brief epic of forced sterilize ass in the mid70s in india that brought down the government, all the ones in the book are noncoercive and voluntary and one of hi favorites tis the one that melanie mentions. In 1979, iran had its islamic revolution, and immediately thereafter they were invaded by saddam hussein, who wanted to grab this oil rich province on their border. The government wasnt organized and would be easy picking. He had the back offing nate to which was not fond of the iranian revolution, and he had lot of sophisticated weaponry from and even nerve gas, which unfortunately some of our tax dollars provided. Iran just had people. So, the Ayatollah Khomeini asked every fertile women to do her patriotic duty to going pregnant to build an arm you fight off invaders and at one point they were near the biological limit for females and they held iraq to a stalemate for eight years, and then there was a truce. But an economist, the planning and budget director of iran, went to the Supreme Leader and said, we have a problem. These kids are going to grow up 10, 15 years, our economy wont be able to employ them all. Another pakistan. And the ayatollah agreed that something should be done. He died, the new ayatollah, the current ayatollah, issued a fatwah saying theres nothing in the koran that says, as he put it, if wisdom dictates it you have the number of children you can responsibly care for, nothing against using any form of Birth Control up to and including operations. Second, they made that stuff available throughout the country. Theres a woman in the book, wonderful ob gyn. Devout muss lynn woman, who cold muslim woman who told be empty brigades bringing surgical teamed to the most remote cornes of the country to make sure everybody had access to contraception, and it was free. But it was voluntary. They had posters saying, you know, two is good, but the only thing that was required was counseling for couples. In those sessions, which were held either in the mosque or health center, among other things they talk about how much it costs to raise, feed, educate, and clothe children. And women didnt need to be told twice. But the fourth probably most important part of this, they encouraged girls to stay in school because a woman who is studying tends to defer her childbearing until her studies are done, and anyone when she is done she has Something Interesting and useful to do, economically helpful, she wants to be a mother but you cant do all of that stuff if you have seven kids. So everwhelmingly, wherever i went, rich country, poor country, you get a girl through secondary school and on the average worldwide she will have two children or fewer, and if with were doing that, from now on, education is the best contraceptive of all. We would be coming down win the next two or three generations to a sustainable number. You mention access to contraceptives and education for women as being pretty key elements. There is anything that those of us as americans should know about that or might want to contribute . We are already near replacement rate here. But maybe there are things we can help with, projects around the world. The most important thing, country after country, i found that you dont need to get government involved. This is an individual decision. In iran, they let they told people, have as many children as you want, but people got the idea. I go to the vatican in this book, and we all know the vaticans position on this and the vatican frankly cant change that position because it would theyre painted into a corner called papal infallibility. If theres any catholics in the room i mean no offense because i had very interesting conversations and one of my great mentors in life was a Catholic Priest and he is also in the book. But the vatican, which is this country that sis 10 acres is 110 acres, population a thousand, mostly all of them mail, is surrounded by another catholic country called italy, which has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet becaus