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[ engine roar ]

[ deep inhalations and exhalations ]

This... This is insanity.

I like to quote Albert Einstein. He said, when he was asked,

what he thought the basic difference

between genius and stupidity was.

And he never even blinked. He just said,

"Genius has its limits."

Could our way of life collapse?

Could industrial civilization collapse?

And I think it's a genuine worry.

We have tremendous problems generated by ourselves

and limited mental capacity to deal with them.

There's no doubt in my mind, none whatsoever,

that there are catastrophes looming

for our children and grandchildren

that are almost unimaginable to us.

We've built this magnificent structure,

set of structures, that empowers us.

But you have to put quotes around that word

because we're not really empowered.

If anything breaks down in that system

or conversely if we decide

the system is unsustainable

and there are problems in that system,

we're really stuck.

This is what I see as the greatest threat to our future

where complexity and costliness make it impossible

to solve our problems as we've been accustomed to doing.

Each time we get a wakeup call, as we now like to call it,

we wake up briefly and then we go right back

to "I'll think about that tomorrow."

There are huge concepts here.

Like what is reality? What is truth?

We're three and four generations away from the farm.

We've got people that think that there's a machine

in the back of the Piggly Wiggly that makes the food.

I mean, they have no idea.

You know, the West Coast of this nation

has five days of food, five days.

We are playing an intrinsically dangerous game

because we are cutting ourselves off from reality.

And that can come back not just to haunt us,

but we can smack into reality

in a very dramatic way because it's unexpected.

To deal with climate change only on the level of political theory

or on the level of scientific facts is extremely superficial.

We have to investigate what it is

in the deep structure of the human mind

that just makes us unable to move in the face of

cognitive intellectual insight into the facts.

And even also in the face of conscious experience

of the situation we find ourselves.

As a species, we have evolved under natural selection

just as all animal species evolved.

And in our history, there was never selective pressure.

There was never pressure to think more broadly

in terms of either time or space,

and so humans didn't evolve to do so.

Yet that's precisely what sustainability today requires.

Particularly, it requires us to understand the distant past,

because the distant past gives us lessons.

And it also tells us how we came to be

in the circumstances that we're in today.

And we have to understand how to take the lessons of the past

and project them into the future.

We have to anticipate what the future is going to be like.

Humans don't tend to think in terms of the long-term future.

They think in terms of the immediacy of their lives.

Obviously, if we're concerned about the future of humanity,

the future of our planet,

we have to really think in terms of the future.

We have to think in, you know, the long-term.

Natural selection doesn't do that.

Never has done that.

There is no foresight.

There is no forethought,

no looking ahead in nature.

The human species is the only species

that has even the slightest chance of looking ahead,

the slightest chance of using foresight.

And we do...

and we are in a way the best hope

for the future of the world because of that.

But, nevertheless, we've got strong relics

of our evolutionary past.

It's a struggle for us to break away

from the lack of foresight,

the short-termness which bedevils

the whole of the rest of the natural world.

If you think about it, history essentially tells us where we come from

and why we are the way we are to this day.

But it doesn't really tell us where we're going.

We're in a world now where the future matters.

And yet we're still wired for the here and now.

Evolution has invented many things.

It has invented emotions. It has invented color vision.

It has invented the conscious sense of selfhood.

And it has obviously also invented self-deception.

We now have changed every cubic meter of air and water,

And every hectare of land on earth now has a human imprint.

We are moving into a new era.

And the question is:

Are we the kind of creature,

are we the kind of being that can handle this new epic,

the anthropocene that we have created?

Throughout history, there's been conflict.

But actually humans are really evolved

to get on with each other in groups.

It's when those groups are in conflict,

fighting over resources,

that you have the wars and the battles.

And, of course, you can always land grab for more territory.

But what happens when you run out of territory?

What happens when you run out of land?

There's almost nothing we can exploit in terms of space

on this planet anymore.

We are exploiting time now.

We're destroying the quality of life

of future human beings on this planet,

and we know that we do it.

[ distant chanting ]

[ chanting in Hawaiian ]

The ainais our land, the aina.

Why do certain groups,

even those who aren't perpetuating a problem,

why are they taking action to benefit future generations

in ways that would, say,

help them overcome problems of climate change?

Well, the Hawaiian word ai is to eat.

Mea aiis the food.

So ainais the land, mea aiis the food.

And just this area alone here we know could feed families.

It could feed a lot of people, and once we get it going,

it's just maintaining it and keeping it in production.

Whatever we put into the aina, we put into our body.

So if you put poison into the aina,

you're only going to put poison into yourself.

If you put good mana, good life force, into the aina,

you put it into yourself, yeah?

So we are all connected:

the body and the aina.

So no matter where you are, you always have aina.

You take care of your aina; you malama aina.

You're taking care of your ancestor, your ancestral lands,

because our ancestors are buried in the aina,the bones.

So we always walk with them,

especially when you come into a place like this.

They're all around us.

So it is our kuleana, our responsibility,

to maka'ala, to become aware,

and to raise awareness of your kupuna

and of your ancestral lands, which is inside here,

this whole kino, the body and the ainais one.

People do things largely because in one way or another

enhances their own well-being,

it enhances their own interests and welfare.

The difference is what people do to enhance their well-being.

So kupuna,our ancestors,

they utilize aquaculture and agriculture.

Yeah? And they integrate the two.

So not only we can farm the food,

but we can farm fish along with the food.

If you live in a farming society

where there's all kinds of things that, you know,

affect your survival chances,

future orientedness suddenly becomes a matter of life and death.

It becomes really important.

And we live down over here.

This is the last four farms

that are remaining out of all this area.

Polynesians developed a highly complex society in Hawaii

that was sustainable entirely on local resources.

They had no hope of getting resources from outside.

And they didn't need resources from outside.

The psychology necessary for that future orientedness,

one way in which it's cultivated

is through the development of deep genealogies,

where you think about your ancestors

going back through numerous generations

and then project forward.

Our kupunahad it figured out.

They had to. They had to figure it out...

because we're on this island.

There's no place to go.

Captain James Cook came.

Over one million Hawaiians living in the islands, one million.

After 2,000 years of living out here in isolation,

they were one million strong.

Today we have about 1.2, maybe 1.4 million people today.

We import 90% of our food.

We're 90% dependent on fossil fuels.

And we still get people homeless.

Yeah.

Whatever we take, we want to make sure

that the next guy that come after us

enjoy the same things we enjoy.

Common, the psychological instinct

when faced with a problem

is to try to figure out who the antagonist is

or who the perpetrator of the problem is.

Ultimately, we all do things that serve our own interests.

But the things that we do

have different implications for people.

We're taught that everything we do today

impact the next seven generations.

The next seven, brah.

Just think about this: What if...

there was no more barges,

no more boats, no more ships,

no more airplanes flying into Hawaii.

How many of you guys think we're gonna survive?

Hawaii is an example of how we have transformed places and ourselves

from environments in which humans and the environment were symbiotic

to environments that can only be sustained

by continual input of outside resources,

all ultimately dependent on fossil fuels.

Here we are in the wettest state in the world... -Yeah.

And we drink bottled water. -I know.

We can consume most anything we want,

and so we tend to think, since we grew up in such a society,

that this is the normal human condition.

In fact, it's not normal.

It's highly unusual in human history.

And there are questions about how long it can continue.

The golf course takes a lot of water.

They own several springs on their side, rivers.

It's the fertile resources and the food producing areas

and the medicine areas

and all the upland areas that they own

and really don't probably have an idea

of what they have under their control.

Our loko i'ais our food stock, our refrigerator,

our cabinet, our food source.

So we want to build this wall.

We want to bring the rocks back up to its...

to the highest point of the highest tide.

That's what we want to do is we want to farm the fish.

And we want to use a natural life cycle of the fish...

so we don't overtake.

We are all in the same canoe.

We're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

on these little islands, these little specks.

No place to go.

As Hawaiians, we understand that concept

that these guys are the ones that are gonna live forever,

but our time is so short.

How would it change if there were no legacy

of me, of you, of any of us?

I think that would profoundly alter

the way we think about ourselves, our lives,

and our place on this planet.

This is a pula pula.

This is the baby that grows off of it

that we break off, the oha.

And we're gonna plant this, and it's gonna have its own family.

And it's gonna create future generations.

So this just continues to carry on and on,

and what we do is we cut the leaf here.

We're still surviving. We're still here.

So what are we gonna do for the ones that come after us?

And this is what we eat.

And this is what we plant.

So this part of the plant here is called the ha.

And hais the breath,

the breath of life that carries on,

so very symbolic that this is our seedling

that we plant over and over again.

[ deep inhalations and exhalations ]

Sustainability, to most people,

is a function of what they value.

People will sustain what they value.

They'll work to sustain what they value,

which is always some function of what they're familiar with.

We are, modern humans, creatures of the Enlightenment,

that great era 400 or 500 years ago

where humans discovered their capacity for reason,

where they blew away myths and superstition,

where the earth became disenchanted.

And so we recreated ourselves as rational creatures

who could look around us,

assess the world, study it,

evaluate it, gather the facts.

and work out how to transform the world,

how to change things in our own interests.

A lot of us are raised to think that we have incredible power.

I mean, we live in an affluent society,

we have access to all this technology.

we can sort of go where we want.

We can get in our car, we can get information.

But when you look at it, we really don't have a lot of autonomy

in the sense that we rely heavily, almost entirely,

on other systems for that power.

If one looks at the dynamics of C02

and the latest facts from physics,

it is very clear that...

the whole development of the earth's climate

will unfold in an uncontrollable and in a catastrophic way.

We have already now waited too long.

It's also not something that you can turn off

like a boiling pot of water on your kitchen stove.

Even if you turn it off,

the development, the dynamics in our atmosphere,

will continue for centuries.

Humanity lives in a severe state of self-denial,

of self-deception,

of repression of facts right now.

We just hope that what the scientists are telling us will happen,

we simply hope that it won't.

We're not enlightened creatures.

We're subject to the same type of superstitious thinking

where our hubris overwhelms our capacity to reason.

Somebody says, you know, how much money are you saving for retirement?

And you know, we can show you with numbers:

Here's what a person with your needs, your requirements,

is going to need for 20 years of retirement.

How much are you saving?

Oh, you're not saving anything? Wow.

Like more and more Americans.

Okay, how do you try to get through retirement?

Uh, they have no answer.

They understand that they have no answer.

They understand they're going to be in trouble

is as clearly they can understand anything,

and yet they're not changing their behavior.

Why is that?

It's because our rational brain

is fully capable of grasping an abstraction like the future,

or the future with no money.

You get that.

But the part of your brain that motivates you,

the limbic, the lizard brain,

that part has no conception of the future. It can't--

It totally can't understand anything beyond the here and now.

So you can talk until you're blue in the face about a problem,

whether it's your lack of retirement money

or the fact that water supplies are gonna be insufficient

for the number of people we're gonna have--

any number of sort of future-oriented problems--

and part of your brain is going,

"Yeah, yeah, that's terrible, that's terrible,"

And another part of your brain is going,

"I don't hear you. I don't care.

"I'm only interested in dealing with the here and now,

and the here and now looks great."

Well, the old adage in the West is that...

whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin'.

When the storms come off the Pacific Ocean

and they hit the Sierra Nevadas, they're torn apart.

Our best storms come out of Southern California anyhow,

when the air currents can get between all the mountain ranges.

There's mountain ranges all across the state of Nevada.

It's one of the most mountainous states there is,

if not the most mountainous state.

So by the time they get all the way to eastern Nevada,

there's not much moisture left.

Our annual rainfall is only about eight inches.

Water speculators are buying all the ranches

all along the river, the Humboldt.

They're just buying everything up for the same reasons:

for water to go to the cities.

It's a little bit intimidating.

you know, you walk up there and you sit down and...

Of course, when they had the prehearing in Reno,

one whole side of the room was full of...

$1,000-an-hour alligators, or, you know,

lawyers for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

I don't know what they get, but, I mean...

And a bunch of farmers

on the other side arguing for their life,

for the next generation.

I wanted to draw as much attention not to myself,

but to the plight, to what was going on.

Thus, when they said how long will it take you

to interview your witnesses, how many witnesses you got,

and how much time also,

I put down all my animals,

all my horses, everything,

and then wrote down, um,

that it'd probably take 30 days to interview 'em all,

which the lawyers should have gone along with that,

because, you know, they get paid by the hour.

We have this kind of defense mechanism where we forget.

We deny that things are difficult.

For example in California now:

We are in our second drought year

in what, pretty obviously, is gonna be a drought cycle.

And people are beginning to realize we have a problem.

What they don't realize is that a thousand years ago,

we had droughts that lasted, or drought cycles, 100 years or more,

when the snowpack in the Sierra was 45% of what it is today--

and today it's low.

I've talked to water experts.

Their biggest problem-- they deliver the water,

they're the people in the trenches.

Their biggest problem

is people denying that there are water shortages.

Every time they build a new hotel,

what's the number one theme they've got?

Water parks, water slides.

They've got a boat floating in a moat.

They've got huge sprinklers, or whatever those things are.

Water shows at night.

For God's sakes, I mean, it's a desert!

Our civilization, our society,

is facing a limit to what we can do.

We haven't realized that yet.

But there is this limit.

And we're crashing against this limit.

And it is going to be seen

how we fare in this big transition

which will have to do with the limits we face,

because really we're going into it

without understanding what we're doing.

A little bit of our self model is conscious.

We can attend to it. Most of our self model,

controlling the body, is completely unconscious.

And, of course, one way to put the question

is what is it in the human self model

that now makes it impossible to act

on the level of the species as a whole?

So we behave in ways that are rational,

even though we don't consciously think about the causes

and the consequences of our behavior.

We're highly programmed to respond

to certain categories of stimuli:

Rewarding stimuli,

and the more immediately rewarding,

the more imminent the reward,

the more compelling we are.

And novel stimuli,

threatening stimuli,

sexual stimuli,

signs of anger or aggression--

We have evolved to attend to these things.

It's called the mismatch hypothesis.

There's a time lag between how the brain evolves

and how society changes.

At this point, we're left with brains

that are similar to what they were

on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000 years ago,

and probably very similar to the way they were

250,000 years ago,

but in a vastly different environment.

We're very alert that we have almost immediate responses.

Our bodies are programmed, um...

either to find a basic response

if we perceive a danger

or to engage in courtship immediately

if we think there is an opportunity for mating.

It's natural selection

acting in every generation:

Simply those that leave many surviving offspring

leave lots of copies of their genes.

Those that leave few or no offspring

leave few copies of their genes.

Organisms are predisposed to survive

and to leave descendants.

It's scary to think about what has happened

to the world population over the last 300 years.

In the middle 1700s was perhaps half a billion.

And it is now seven.

The world population has increased by a factor of 10.

The way we live today is really a product

of the last 200 years,

partly coming from the Industrial Revolution,

but very largely coming from the subsidies of fossil fuels

that have allowed us to escape the constraints

of current solar energy.

And it's estimated that humans living

under a solar energy regime

can achieve a population density,

a stable population density,

of perhaps no more than two billion people.

And the desire to have a higher income is fairly intense,

even at the very high income levels

that we have on average in the United States

and Norway and other places that I know well.

So that driving force, I think, is there,

and will remain there.

We grow more and more complex to solve problems.

This is an escalation dynamic,

and it's the same dynamic as in an arms race.

In the world of complex systems, to use a colloquial expression,

there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Complexity always has a cost.

And, ultimately, the cost is paid in terms of energy.

We've never had a year like this

where it's been so dry and so hot.

Wildfires, record rainfalls other places.

If they think it's gonna keep getting worse

on a relative scale to what we've seen this year.

That's probably what may happen.

And it's sort of a scary thing to think about.

Our lawyer's not the biggest liar.

Our weatherman's the biggest liar.

He'll tell us we've got an 80% chance of rain

and we get a sprinkle.

And we get a 30% chance of rain we'll end up

with two inches of rain. We're flooded.

I've just been so close to breaking down and crying.

And this is what, you know,

is just really brings it on, is this pasture.

I mean, there's really nothing of value here for a cow to eat.

When these crops were at this stage last year,

our wells were out of water.

We were fighting tooth and nail

just to try to keep these crops alive

and keep 'em going just to produce any kind of crop.

You know, it takes eons for topsoil to develop

from decaying vegetation.

One of my neighbors made the comment

in his old rocky ranch

that he had about one inch of topsoil

between him and starvation.

And you have to protect it with the grasses

and don't overgraze it.

And we're totally dependent upon the rainfall.

Without dirt, I'm done. I'm over with.

They might as well just go ahead and call the people in,

tell 'em to dig me a 6-foot hole,

put me in a box, and call it good.

That's sort of the weather mantra in central Texas:

Drought, drought, drought, drought, flood.

The term that everybody uses is just "brutal."

Where we would normally see honey stores and pollen stores

for them getting ready for the upcoming wintertime,

there was nothing in there,

because all of the natural water sources had dried up.

When drought affects our natural pollinators,

it has a horrible effect on our environment

and our food supplies.

It just sucks your soul dry.

Water is the new oil.

And it's become a commodity just like oil rights

and mineral rights used to be for Texas.

And the battle, the competition

is just going to get more intense

as more and more people move here

and it gets hotter and drier. and stays that way.

Responding to climate change in the area of farming

is another arena in which society in the future

is going to experience increasing costs

and diminishing returns.

We know that the consequences of the industrialized world

are going to place a great burden upon our children

and we have to do something now.

But it does raise the question:

Even though we're aware of all these consequences,

why are we still not radically changing our behavior?

The fact that we're culture-creating individuals

means that we create our own sense of psychology

and our own sense of values

and our own sense of what's important.

Wai waiin Hawaii means values.

So you can see this is our values.

This is what we value, the wai wai,the water,

the source of life:

What is important, What's gonna sustain us,

where the water's coming from,

how the water is managed and used.

They have a legacy of the land that they inhabit,

and they think of themselves as being part of the land,

continuous in the land,

and that, therefore, they should--

what they do now really defines who they are.

We're creating the world that's creating us all the time.

What do we do by way of reproducing,

to have a culture that carries on in the future?

We don't just produce babies.

We send them to school.

And we instill in them the norms of the culture

and the knowledge of the culture.

The huge engine of consumerism was driving

and became the economic and cultural raison d'etre

of our lives as Americans.

And the American dream became defined

as what you own, what you have.

And you start thinking there's something wrong with the car I have,

or the house I have,

or the spouse I have.

I mean, there is this sense

that we're entitled to the next best thing.

You know, we're socialized

and we're existing in a cultural context.

That cultural context shapes us and constrains us.

Strategic locations ensure repetition.

And repetition creates consumer remembrance,

driving home a message

not once, not twice, but many times,

thus bridging the gap between the manufacturer

and the consumer.

One of the universal characteristics of children is

that they will reliably copy the adults around them

in their actions and their practices,

even when the actions have no purpose whatsoever.

This suggests that, within our brains,

there is a mechanism designed to imitate others around us.

So we are kind of the willing copiers,

the willing replicators of this information.

And we can't help it.

We are relinquishing more and more

of our day-to-day decision-making

to the world of the machine.

You go out on the street today,

you're gonna see half the people

walking around are carrying

these little things around,

their Smart Phone,

and they're following the instructions

of their Smart Phone as to...

whether to turn right or left

at the next intersection.

Because of the changes in society created by the image,

we're moving further and further away from the real.

And we're moving more and more towards the image.

So an image-saturated society has moved away from nature,

has moved away from, say, realism.

We start to move away from the connection

that we have with the world.

We feel like we're part of the social reality,

the images that we're surrounded with,

but we can't change anything.

As we grow up from children to adults,

we identify with the groups that we think we belong to,

and we behave accordingly.

I remember living in Oahu.

I went to a very good private school,

went to a very nice small private college on Oahu.

You know, I was just caught up in the, um...

the fast lane to make money, make money,

make money, make money, and, uh...

and drive the nice car

and have the nice house,

and that's supposed to make me happy and fulfilled.

It leaves you sort of, by definition, unhappy

because nothing-- no state you ever achieve is gonna be permanent.

One way of looking at the problem of...

of why we're wrecking our world

is not to think of humans as the drivers of what's going on,

but to think of the memes as the drivers of what's going on.

So the whole way of thinking memetically is to say

all the ideas, stories,

ways of doing things, technologies

that we copy from person to person are replicated.

So genes are one replicator

that's copied by reproducing bodies.

And the memes, the buildings, the wires, all this stuff...

they are replicators too.

So I wake up in the morning totally stressed out,

smoking cigarettes, about 30, 40 pounds heavier,

um...just trying to find out,

you know, where am I going with my life?

What will be my legacy?

What am I gonna leave behind?

And then I see--I hear...

woosh, woosh.

Then I hear the steersmen call.

"Hup, hu!"

Woosh, woosh.

They switch, "Hup, hu!"

Woosh, woosh.

"Hup, hu," and you can hear everyone's breath.

I can hear everybody working together.

I could hear the sound of the waves going.

And every time I heard that "hup, hu,"

switching, changing: to huli,to flip.

And that was the message that I got that day

when I heard them say, "Hup, hu."

Huis short for the Hawaiian word huli.

Huli,to change, to flip, to turn over.

It's unsettling to think of oneself

as just an ephemeral process that comes and goes,

that's built out of scraps of the environment,

as well as the stuff in here.

Being a complicated, powerful self

with lots of beliefs in things that have to be defended

doesn't make us happy,

but it propagates the memes.

And I think this is at least a part

of our awful tendency to be unhappy with who we are.

Without even knowing, just quit my job, and came back home.

And I reconnected with my elders.

And my elder said, "Ah, hey, Vene,

I need you to go build a fish pond."

And I'm like, "Brah, a fish pond?

I don't even know how to stack rocks."

And he's all, "Ke kahi ke haki."

Whatever you put in is what you get out.

"You put in one hour,

"your wall gonna be this big.

"You put in 100 hours,

"your wall gonna be that big.

"You put in 1,000 hours,

"your wall gonna be this big.

"You put in 10,000 hours,

your wall gonna be this big."

Yeah, hi kumu, I understand now.

Hiki no,just do it.

Evolution is blind.

There is no goal as such.

It just is the set of attributes

which are best suited to the changing environment.

We adapt mainly to conditions as they are.

So we become socialized. We self-domesticate.

We select for those behaviors and traits

which are the best and most conducive to living in groups.

All my friends, like even some of my family members,

are like, wow, why...

why you building a rock wall?

You're not even getting paid.

Are you crazy? Why would somebody want to do that?

To try to explain why so many people can act

counter to their self-interest,

I think you have to talk about

the power of them being deceived.

One avenue to deceiving someone

is to manipulate their system of self-deception.

Any state or authority that has to control the behavior

of large groups of human beings

or any company that wants to market a product

and control consumer behavior

has to somehow lock into

these mechanisms of self-deception.

If you want to sell something to people

that they actually do not need,

you have to tweak their preferences.

You have to tweak their wishes.

You have to lure them into some perception

that this act of shopping, for instance,

or this act of voting will give meaning to their life...

Because they understand intuitively

that we're all animals seeking social status.

The larger idea that we can have whatever we want,

we can feel, you know, whatever way we want.

that we can achieve the state of happiness we want

simply by consuming,

that idea,

the signal that we're receiving

and always will receive,

is that that's always going to be possible.

We've gotten so used to this idea of continual progress

and feeling better at each juncture

that we don't even question it anymore.

The propagandists, the perception managers,

know that they are creating reality

for tens of millions of people.

"You reality-oriented people don't understand.

We create a new reality."

And then there's also the version of the Monopoly game

in our economy, which is all about competing

to see who can collect the most toys,

but also the biggest number on their financial asset statement.

This is induced self-deception now--

I'm being victimized--

and my greed is being played upon.

We all want money.

And we'd all love the scheme

which, if repeated, could get us even more money.

You know, "We are doing God's work,"

which you may recall... [ laughs ]

is a phrase from the head of Goldman Sachs.

And I suspect he truly believes that

because that's what the culture tells him and affirms.

Our brains are designed, by evolution,

to just reinforce what we already believe.

But why would that be?

In part, I think there's an evolutionary reason for it,

is that deep beliefs

like religious beliefs or political beliefs,

ideological, cultural, social beliefs--

these are all wrapped up in our tribe, um...

the sort of unity of the tribe.

This is what we stand for.

Ain't that the way great empires work?

Newsreel announcer: They are dug in and heavily fortified.

We are literally destroying the source of our own existence

and think we are getting richer as we do it.

So everyone, left, right, up, down,

thinks that they accept propaganda

as long as it's their propaganda for their cause.

On climate change, the whole problem is magnified

by the fact that business groups that have strong self-interests

in one or another position set up so-called think tanks--

call them self-deception...

call them deceit and self-deception tanks--

whose business is to generate information

in support of a predetermined position.

Now that ain't how we do science.

We're not supposed to have a predetermined position.

The whole point is to have no predetermined position

unless it's something that's already been well established.

And then you build on it.

So the tobacco industry used to have some group

that busied themselves trying to show

that tobacco was good for you, it didn't cause cancer.

It's nonsense.

What's the level of consciousness

of the various actors in the system?

The levels of CO2 we produce are increasing.

But don't worry. Norwegian oil

is still the cleanest on the market.

Whatever that means. I don't even know what this means.

Norway is the fifth largest oil exporter in the world.

But people think of themselves as little Norway.

[ speaking Norwegian ]

"Norway is a little country"

is a common expression.

And this is just this way of sort of saying,

well, we're backwards people who are very nature-loving.

We're very environmental, and...

and you know, what does this have to do with us?

Is the whole world getting together? No.

Americans, I think, like to point the finger at China

and say, "Oh, you know, we're not so bad

"because look at the Chinese.

"They're the fastest growing economy,

"and they're the ones that are really--

It's not us. And there's nothing we can do anyway."

And we do that personally,

but we also do that as a collective.

"I'm only gonna change if you're gonna change."

If I don't think that you're changing,

it's not fair for me to change.

We want things to be fair.

We mutually use perceived inequity to do nothing.

It would be much easier if you really didn't have to change

most of the rest of your life--

you just had to switch products.

Like you'd like to keep eating Twinkies,

but you'd like them

to be made with organic ingredients.

An organic Twinkie is still a Twinkie.

We are really looking at swapping a few ingredients,

maybe changing the packaging,

or maybe changing where we get one of the ingredients.

But we don't really want to change the larger system.

But it's like, hey, don't interfere with my fantasy.

It's the way that we construct this double reality

of it being not real:

knowing about climate change,

but still seeing it as not real.

This is a cultural practice

that kind of holds everything in place

and makes it so we don't act.

Just like with, you know, counseling between individuals,

one of the first things you do is learn that if you just blame,

you're going to turn the other party into a defensive entity,

and the conversation's going to go nowhere.

Mana.

Some of us have good mana.

Some of us have not so good mana.

A huge amount of what we do today

is enjoy something now

while deferring the cost into the future.

I mean, that's how so many of our systems work.

That's how the system of credit works.

People seem to be very unwilling

to trade secular goods for sacred goods.

So, for example, if you were to ask

how much could I buy your children off you for?

Or how much payment will you accept to take away your freedom?

Things which we see as sacred we're not willing to trade

for monetary or material goods.

Our wealth comes from energy.

And so credit becomes in effect a lien on future energy.

When we take on debt,

we are promising to repay it with future energy.

Consequences of a default

or even a serious prospect of default

by the United States are impossible to predict

and awesome to contemplate.

So the system of debt relies on goodwill and on trust.

It relies on the assumption

that we will continue to have goodwill and trust

in the future.

But if energy becomes more difficult to obtain in the future,

then the loans we've taken out today

are going to become harder and harder to repay

and the financial system will simply collapse.

As the financial system collapses,

food will no longer be moved to the cities,

food will no longer be moved across oceans,

goods will no longer be moved across oceans,

and there's a serious risk

that our entire societies would collapse.

The United States has borrowed a huge amount of money.

And one has, of course, taken it for granted

that that money will be repaid,

that the U.S. will actually pay all of the money

it has borrowed from its citizens,

from the Europeans, and from the Chinese.

One-third of all the money is borrowed from the Chinese.

And who will have to pay?

Well, it is, of course, the young.

For 224 years, the policy of Congress

and every president has been we pay our bills.

We tend to go into debt against the future.

In a way, we're doing that with the atmosphere.

We're just drawing out future credit

that we may have to pay back.

Then it's kind of a death by a thousand cuts.

We're going to change the chemistry of the ocean.

We're also changing some circulation patterns

of the ocean that affect fisheries and things like that.

Those have the potential to really ripple

through our whole, our whole even social system.

For every unit of heat

that has gone into the atmosphere from global warming,

25 units have gone into the ocean.

[ speaking Hawaiian ]

Catch a wave, baby.

Oh, yeah, feel this?

This is what I'm talking about right now,

riding the wave. Kainalu.

There's a wave in the heavens, the wind.

There's a wave in the ocean, the wave.

And there's a wave in the earth, the lava.

Kainalu.

Be like the wave.

Hup, huli!

The fossil fuels that we burn,

as they settle out into the ocean,

are changing the chemistry to the point that,

within the next 50 years,

the ocean may not be able to sustain plankton,

the very base of the food chain,

because the acidity eats away at the exoskeletons

of a lot of the different types of plankton.

So the fact that, in the last few years,

the effect that humans have had

on the very ocean that sustains us...

is dramatic to say the least.

The Pacific Ocean

is 68 million

square miles.

68 million square miles.

It covers up one-third of our planet.

It's over 20 times the size of the United States.

Chlorofluorocarbons and other greenhouse gases

do not know political borders.

They just travel around the world.

There is no place

that humans have not left their impact.

And 99% of what we buy and use today

is obsolete and trash six months from now.

In every single trial we did,

3,000 miles across the ocean,

the one shocking thing

I could bring back to my friend is...

there's not one place in the ocean

that just had ocean and ocean creatures left in it,

that plastic is everywhere.

Somewhere along the way,

we have been smokescreened and clouded by conveniences.

So easy, convenient.

The ocean is downhill from everything.

There is no away.

It's petroleum-based.

It absorbs other chemicals.

It releases other chemicals.

But it works around, and it's not biodegradable.

It doesn't break down in time.

It is photodegradable.

But all that means is that wave action and light

break it down into smaller and smaller bits.

It doesn't go away.

And then every night, these little creatures,

the myctophids, little lantern fish,

come up from the deep water,

they feed on what's supposed to be plankton,

and then they make their way back down during the day.

Well, they're feeding on plastic

because that's what's there--

that's what's everywhere--

And that literally,

they make up about 50% of the biomass.

Everything eats them.

We're plasticizing the ocean creatures

from tiny to huge whales, all the way through.

And we're plasticizing them from the inside out.

For sometimes products that we've maybe used

for five minutes or ten minutes,

the fact that a plastic water bottle

can last 200 years?

We can look at ways to change,

but that's not enough.

Recycling? Great idea. It's not enough.

So then comes the unfortunate part where...

you run into reality.

That's an aspect of self-deception

we always have to bear in mind.

Whatever we put inside there, we put inside us.

Sure, global warming is going on now,

and the consequences are not beautiful,

but somehow this damn thing will be solved.

Well, maybe somehow it will.

Any uncertainty--

and there's a lot of uncertainty about the future--

it tends to engender unreasonable optimism

about what will fill that bit of uncertainty.

So right now, if there's uncertainty

about our climate models right now,

people are going to latch onto that uncertainty

and assume the best.

Optimism is a good thing.

Too much optimism is a bad thing.

Sometimes having misperceptions,

having wrong images about reality,

seems to be adaptive.

We believe we can put more memory on a chip,

that we can build a more efficient car,

w can build a better house, is a good thing.

But optimism can go too far

when we think every problem can be solved,

that there isn't really a problem at all.

Probably the same thing about the future,

which is probably what I'm doing.

I'm assuming the best. I'm assuming

that technology will be able to fill these gaps

in such a way where we won't have

a total environmental collapse

which will lead to resource wars

and shrinking of the human population.

System destruction means

that climate change becomes so bad that...

large areas of the planet

become impossible for humans to survive

and agriculture is destroyed

and lots of people die of starvation.

You know, these kinds of things are part of the models.

We have to tell these things.

If we do,

people say that we are catastrophists, which is fine,

but we still have to tell these things.

But the problem is that, when we tell these things,

people don't react.

They're scared, they tend to retreat

and say, "No more of this. It's so horrible,

so awful that we don't want to hear it."

It takes complex, expensive technologies

and much investment of energy to get energy.

Today we live in the most complex societies that have ever existed.

And we are far beyond the level of complexity that can be sustained through solar energy.

We really are reliant on fossil fuels

and to a certain extent also on nuclear power.

You can show that with many wars people start,

like my own people have started terrible wars

and brought great suffering over humanity...

In the beginning, if you look at the internal records,

the idea is always, "Aw, come on. Piece of cake.

"We'll just walk in there.

After four days, we'll have this done."

Then after four days into it, there's a sudden surprise.

This is taking longer than we thought.

Our technological superiority doesn't help.

And I think to have the idea, "Ah, one way,

"we're gonna find a way with climate change.

"These scientists are gonna find something.

"But only--if we only get our act together soon.

"We will manage.

Nothing was really that bad in the past of mankind."

That is fully delusional.

And this growth must continue

these next 10 years.

Those 13 million new jobs must be created.

And right now,

the promise looks very good.

With technology comes cost.

This crop is bringing the same money it brought

in the 1970s.

And in the early 1970s, you could buy a new tractor

and a new pickup for less than $10,000.

Now our tractors cost $200,000 or more.

Our vehicles are costing $40,000 to $50,000 apiece.

And we're bringing this equipment out here.

We're spending that kind of money to wear them out.

Many societies collapsed in the past.

And they collapsed for reasons that we can see operating in our own society today.

Like the Romans,

they never really understood

that their military system was based

on the support they had from agriculture,

and that means that, if your land has been ruined by erosion,

you cannot support so many troops.

And if you cannot support so many troops,

you cannot defend the empire

or attack other countries to rob them,

which was the way Roman wealth was built,

by robbing the neighbors,

which is normal in human histories.

You know, we can move.

I mean, if it becomes too warm somewhere,

we can move to a cooler place.

But most of us cannot move.

From what I understand, in ancient Hawaii,

it was always about, uh...

about the aloha.

Alo,meaning to be present, yeah, face.

It also means to be grounded to the earth.

And hais the breath of life.

So aloha is to offer that breath of life.

So aloha is a way of life for us as Hawaiians.

What you got to do is kaheha.

You know, us Hawaiians, we don't pray like this.

It wasn't till the missionaries came,

make us guys pray like this.

Us guys, we pray like this.

What we're witnessing now is really the final phase

of the great European Enlightenment

when all of the advances of material acquisition,

of scientific progress, of technological conquest,

are now collapsing in on themselves.

We have become a planetary force.

This is as profound a transition as civilization itself.

Originally the U.S. ended, you know, at Louisiana.

And then there was the Louisiana Purchase.

And then we stole almost half of Mexico.

And so there was always this wild land out there

waiting for us to settle,

agriculturalize, i.e., plant crops,

have herds of animals--

domesticated instead of wild.

So bison get replaced by cattle.

And then you build this massive industrial system

in prime temperate-zone land

that you've cleared the other inhabitants out of.

By deciding that they didn't count,

that they were simply part of the wildlife of those continents,

why, it was free land, ready for European populations to exploit.

That enabled us to imagine

that we had a vast increment of carrying capacity for homo sapiens.

I call that the Age of Exuberance.

We exuberantly expanded into this seemingly limitless carrying capacity.

That was one of the reasons why we became so great--

the receding frontier. We always had the options

to make up for any current problems, if you will,

by just settling more land.

Well, of course, at some point you reach California.

There are no more Indians to extinguish and so forth.

We live in a culture now, many of whose norms and values

and ideas were formed by that Age of Exuberance,

by the myth of limitlessness.

This has instilled in us a way of thinking

that we will always have abundance,

that we will never be constrained by resources.

Say to someone, "Well, we're gonna run out

of iron or steel in such and such a year,"

and they'll say, "Oh, well, maybe we can get it

from the moon."

Well, Jesus God Almighty,

it costs a ton of money to send two people to the moon,

much less an iron ore collecting expedition.

Early after Hiroshima, we began thinking,

ah, now that we're in the Atomic Age, there are no limits.

We've got all this new energy. We can do all kinds of things.

And we didn't think what are the limits that are going to exist

even in an age of abundant energy?

We've become accustomed to ignoring

or breaking through the limits

to human progress.

After all, progress is what defines us.

But here's where we get into total absurdities in conventional economics,

with economists literally telling us,

if we have enough money, we don't need nature.

If I have a piece of technology lying around in my apartment,

I use it, whether I need to or not.

It kind of begs out, "Hey, look, I'm a piece of technology.

"I cost something...

Use me, please."

The same thing is true in my opinion

for amassing large sets of armaments.

It's like technology is sitting around

and saying, "Hey, use me."

We're dreaming to think people will change.

And that's in a way why the hopes lie--

the hopes and the fears lie with something else.

That may be technology.

Barrier? What barrier?

We can geo-engineer the planet.

We've transformed every other environment.

Why can't we transform the planet as a whole?

You name it, we can set the planetary temperature

wherever you like. That's the plan,

and it's a very serious plan

that quite a number of clever and influential people

are pursuing right now.

Perhaps the foremost geo-engineering technology

is known as sulfate aerosol spraying.

And the idea is to mimic the effects

of large volcanic eruptions.

And the way they would do it--

there are a number of ideas.

One would be adapt a fleet of aircraft

by fitting them with special tanks and nozzles

and sending them up on a regular basis

to spray sulfate aerosols

or the precursor chemicals into the stratosphere

and simply spray these chemicals out behind them.

They would form into sulfate particles.

And pretty soon, within days, weeks, certainly months,

the Earth would be surrounded

by this fine haze of sulfate particles.

This isn't solving climate change.

It's merely suppressing one of the symptoms.

Carbon dioxide will still be present

and probably growing in the atmosphere.

The oceans will continue to acidify.

Who's gonna have their hand on the global thermostat?

This is not a problem with our societies.

It's not a social problem that needs resolution.

It's a technological problem.

So geo-engineering

is really the techno fix to end all techno fixes.

The question is,

will it be the techno fix that ends the world?

What are we? What are we becoming?

When we start talking about geo-engineering,

about taking control of the Earth's system in totality,

we really are behaving like the sorcerer's apprentice.

And we all know what happens in the end.

The powers that we attempt to master

are vastly more powerful than we imagined.

It's just a pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it,

floating out there in space.

We're trivial compared to the universe.

The idea that there's an inevitable progress

and people are able to learn from mistakes

and elevate everything to a higher level...

is just a myth we believe.

The water comes from Pu'u Kukui, from this mountain,

and it averages about 400 inches of rain.

It is considered one of the wettest spots on the planet today.

Probably the wettest spot.

See, the streams are all drying up.

And these waters are diverted

to the sugarcane fields

and to all the hotels and businesses

and the homes.

There's no more water for taro.

And they're trying to tell us guys that our taro needs help...

we need GMOs to help us out.

[ scoffs ] We don't need no help.

We need water.

It's not gonna be us local people that will be farming on the earth.

It will basically be a middle to upperclass population

that will be able to be on those lands,

which is fine,

but there are people that don't have.

And we need to find ways that we can both have

and both be happy and coexist

and be able to manage our resources at the same time.

200 years ago, every individual was required to ask

in almost everything that you did, every action you took,

every step you took, you were required to ask:

Is this sustainable?

Because if it wasn't sustainable, you had to stop.

Only the rich could afford to behave as if the world--

as if sustainability didn't matter.

Everyone else had to build that in

to everything they did.

And that was a mark of a person who survived,

because if you didn't pay attention to sustainability,

you died.

It's said that there is no city

more than three days away from a revolution.

And that's because of food supply.

Our industries have perfected just-in-time delivery

so that everything is produced and delivered to industries

and to your stores just as it's needed.

No one keeps stockpiles anymore

because it's too expensive to keep stockpiles.

It's inefficient.

But what this means is that our production and delivery systems

are highly vulnerable to disruption.

Now it climbs up the East Coast.

And then it veers in as it meets a storm

coming down from Canada.

And it was appalling.

There's no heat.

There's no electricity. You cannot read.

There's no television. There's no Internet.

You take a double shot of whatever you take a shot of

and you climb into bed at 8:30

and pray your way through the night.

Future superstorms will be even more damaging

than Hurricane Sandy.

Hurricane Sandy was, in some respects,

a preview of coming attractions.

We are so heavily dependent on electricity.

Our lives--I don't want to say are deformed by it,

but they're certainly organized by it

and dependent on it,

so if you suddenly take it away...

Whoa!

We are basically under the control of totally unhuman systems.

And everybody doesn't want to step up

and say, "You know what?

We might have made a slight mistake."

No, sir. We're just gonna keep stumbling on.

Their milk? It comes from the grocery store.

Their meat? It comes from the grocery store.

Their clothes? They come from the mall.

People just don't have any concept

of how much energy it takes to grow food.

All of these challenges are going to require

increasingly complexity and costliness

at the same time that our energy basis

for funding complexity is decreasing.

It's inevitable that our societies in the future

will become less wealthy.

We will be unable to grow in complexity any further,

and that means unable to solve the problems of the future.

Republican and Democratic presidents

and Treasury secretaries alike

have universally understood the importance

of protecting one of our most precious assets:

the full faith and credit of the United States.

If major nations were to default on their debts,

this would cause the credit system to freeze up.

Trust would evaporate

and credit would evaporate.

And this whole system relying on credit

would then become impossible to sustain.

I often use the metaphor that, for me,

life is like riding in a train

where you're facing backwards.

You always see reality after it's passed you.

It's like our biological past haunts us,

and we're just unable to see the responsibility we have

for all the future generations to be born on this planet.

And we will also see how the whole development

slides from our control,

because it actually is beyond our control.

Certainly there are aspects of our way of life

that we don't want to lose.

In the past, people might have a life expectancy

of about 40 years.

And out of every five children born,

probably three of them would have died of childhood diseases.

We don't want to go back to that way of life.

So I don't know: How do you manage population growth?

I don't know.

How do you make it rain?

A collapse is too gruesome to contemplate

and it's something that we don't want to experience.

We would have a situation where hundreds of millions of people,

perhaps billions of people, would die from starvation,

from disease, from conflict.

And this would all happen within a period

of perhaps two to three months.

If you walk through the pasture every day

observing the grass and the birds and the wildlife,

you become pretty attuned to the situation.

We're living in a delicate deal

and in the big picture of things,

if I manage this ranch for 70 years,

it's just a minute particle in the big picture of time.

And it's my goal to take care of it and pass it on.

[ speaking Hawaiian ]

Aloha. [ continues in Hawaiian ]

The everlasting breath.

The leaf, the lau that sustains us...

that sees all the changes,

and yet still growing in between the freeways

and the development.

So easily we forget about where our food comes from,

where our water comes from.

That's what it is, as Hawaiians.

That's a very sacred saying.

No e au, it's a wise saying.

The ainais always chief.

Our time... so short.

Once the ocean gets too acidic, we're done.

The thing that is important in one's own life

is to face the facts and not to judge oneself.

We hear the calling, a lot of us.

If not, we're not gonna survive.

We're not gonna make the journey.

We're not. Our canoe will sink.

And that's how we look at the Islands,

that we are in a canoe,

that we have to make decisions based on everybody else.

The core of all morality, the first step:

To make the decision,

I will at least try not to fool myself.

Beyond the horizon, the unknown:

That's where we all come from.

And we live in what we call ao,or the light.

We live in the ao.

And our time will sunrise and then our time will sunset.

And so what we gonna do?

What are we gonna leave behind

for our generations, our descendants?

What they gonna say about us?

How do we want to be remembered?

We are all part of this.

♪♪

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