Original subtitles

- When people look at the environment,

look at the world and say, oh everything's fine,

it makes me think of a friend of mine.

And he was a heroin addict and an alcoholic.

And he was a pretty happy heroin addict and alcoholic.

And one day he got into his car,

he'd been shooting up and he'd been drinking.

He got into his car and had some friends in the car

and he was driving,

no one was wearing their seatbelt,

I think you see where this is going.

And if you had asked him and his friends,

as they're in their car, listening to music,

going 100 miles an hour on the freeway,

how they felt, they'd be like,

we feel great, everything's fine!

Ask them three seconds later

when they were in a huge accident,

he lost his legs and two of his friends died.

And how do I convince you that you are that

heroin addict alcoholic in the car

driving without a seatbelt?

'Cause right now, you think things are fine.

I think things are fine.

And I can guarantee you, they are not.

- Whether we know it or not,

whether we like it or not,

humanity is currently facing existential challenges.

Experts warn that life on Earth is likely to change

drastically in just our generation's lifetime

if we continue business as usual.

So, what does our future have in store for us

just in the next few decades?

To explore this compelling question,

we're first going to watch a short 15 minute story

we created that takes place in the year 2050.

After that, we'll come back and hear what scientists

have to say today about the challenges humanity is facing.

- A dramatic day in northern Alaska,

as a 300 foot section of the Dalton Highway

near Sagwan was obliterated by a methane gas explosion.

Leaving behind a large crater.

You are seeing live footage from our

Consolidated News Service Worldeye Drone,

operating 431 miles north of Fairbanks Alaska.

No casualties have been reported,

but the loss of this critical roadway

is expected to cause serious disruptions

for communities throughout the region.

The volatile nature of methane events in this

and other regions if of utmost concern for scientists

monitoring the problem.

For more, we're joined by Dr Marcus Cohen,

who's an advisor to the National Weather Service's

Event Mitigation Unit.

Hello, Dr Cohen.

- Good morning, Megan, glad to be here.

- Dr Cohen, you were telling me over the break

that these methane explosions are nothing new

and you didn't seem to be entirely surprised

by this event either.

- Well, we've been monitoring this phenomenon for decades

and while it's nothing new,

we have seen an increase in the frequency

of these methane bubbles, which is very concerning.

Basically, as the ice melts, underground methane bubbles

rise and eventually leak into the atmosphere.

And sometimes it does so in the form of these

dramatic explosions like we saw today.

- So why is this happening now?

- Well, in short, because the planet is warming,

which is melting the ice and permafrost

that covers the methane.

Methane in the atmosphere heats the planet

and when more of it leaks out from under the ice,

it causes even more warming,

which in turn causes the ice to melt,

which then allows even more methane to reach the surface

and so on and so on.

And this vicious cycle is what we refer to as a

positive feedback loop.

Which, once it gets going, it sustains itself.

- Now that the new International Carbon Mandates

are in place, do you think there's any chance

we can lessen or reverse the situation?

- Well, we started very late,

on meaningful greenhouse gas reforms.

The problem is manmade emissions aren't the only

problem we're facing now.

Even if we completely stop all industrial,

agricultural, and transportation emissions,

bring them down to zero immediately,

the methane and other gasses

that are now being released from under the permafrost

may still push recovery out of reach.

- That is sobering but we have to leave it there

Dr Cohen, on that note,

thank you for being with us today

and helping us understand the situation.

- Thank you, Megan.

- In other news, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Authority, or NOAA, issued new warnings.

They are reporting that the ocean's pH is still decreasing,

meaning it's further acidifying.

This, despite concerted attempts to regulate carbon

emissions and industrial and agricultural runoff.

NOAA reports that as a result,

phytoplankton populations in the ocean

are still on the decline.

And last night in an emergency session,

the United Nations extended the ICM Operational Window

through June of 2052.

Prolonging what were intended to be short term

food and water rationing measures.

We are just receiving some breaking news.

An anti-government group in Seattle

has reportedly taken hostages and barricaded themselves

in Pike Place Market.

We're going to try to Consolidated News reporter

Jasmine Patel, live in Seattle.

Hello, Jasmine, are you there.

- Yes, thank you Megan.

We're outside the old Pike Place Fish Market,

once a Mecca for tourists and shoppers looking

to buy fresh Pacific seafood.

It is here that a group calling themselves

Free American Patriots have staged their symbolic stand.

Last night, 30 members of the group took an estimated

25 people hostage from a nearby rail station.

They are armed and barricaded themselves

inside the old fish market.

- What do we know about the group?

- They are another group of what is being referred to

as the Fish Truth Movement.

They believe fishless oceans are a fabrication

of a government conspiracy trying to force

a vegan agenda on an unknowing American public.

- Have they made any demands?

- They say they will release the hostages

once the government reopens and restocks the fish market.

Something that experts have reiterated

is literally impossible.

- Nurse, nurse!

- Thank you, Jasmine, for that report.

- Nurse!

- What is it Mr. Baker? - It's time for my water.

- I'm looking at a recent US poll...

- Okay, yeah, I'll go get it.

- That shows at least 23% of viewers actually

agree with these groups and believe that fishless oceans

are not real.

I don't think any serious person doubts the UN

when they say fisheries are empty, but

who wouldn't wish it weren't so.

For historical context, fishless oceans

were actually predicted at least 40 years ago.

At a time when about a third of all seafood species

had already crashed.

Some experts predicted back then that we would

have fishless oceans by 2048.

- Here you go. - As we now

know, that was very close to the mark.

- The ICM mandate specifically allows each

citizen eight eight ounce glasses of water a day.

Eight times eight, remember?

My right, as a human being,

even if I am locked up in this nuthouse.

- Yes, Mr Baker, you do have rights.

And I just gave you exactly eight ounces of water.

The dispenser measures it exactly every time.

- That's what they want you to believe.

- Mr Baker, come back here, Mr Baker!

Mr Baker.

- Hey, hey, hey!

- Hey, calm down, back back.

- No, I need water!

- Get him in the bed.

- No, no, I need water! - Okay, okay.

- No, not fair! - You'll get water,

- I need water. - Calm down.

Mr Baker, calm down. - Water.

- It's gonna be okay. - I need water.

Need water. - Shh, okay, okay.

We'll get you some water.

- What's goin' on, who called the page?

- I did, a patient was acting very aggressively,

but he's calmed down now.

- So, what happened?

Oh, Mr Baker again.

- He was complaining I didn't give him his ration

of water and it blew up from there.

- Well, did ya?

- Did I what?

- Give him the right amount.

- What?

What do you think?

I've been hoarding the patients' water for myself?

Of course, I gave it to him and everyone else.

A full eight ounce glass.

What are implying?

- Nothing, sorry, it's just that some of the facilities

had to reduce their rations, so I just wanted

to be sure of our supply and make sure you were

distributing the right amount.

Come on, let's go take a look.

- I'm telling you, she did not give me eight ounces.

- Did you get a glass, sir?

- Yeah, with like maybe five ounces,

but not the full eight.

See, they think you can't tell, but I can,

so I said something, it's my right.

And the orderlies went crazy!

They went crazy, but not me.

I was calm.

- It says here you tried to break the water machine.

I thought you said this morning you were ready to go home.

Really, Mr Baker, I want to discharge you,

but you're making it very difficult to do so.

- Oh come on, I'm ready to go.

Look how calm I am.

And I'm not, I'm not suicidal either,

and you know that.

I just wanna go home.

I can have more water there anyway.

- Mr Baker...

- Oh, you think a hospital, of all places,

wouldn't hold water from its patients.

- Mr Baker, we're just following the ICM mandates.

You're not seriously suggesting that we don't.

And besides, we all need to ration water

while there's a shortage,

and once you're discharged,

you should be doing the exact same thing at home.

- Okay, whatever.

- What's this I hear about fish?

The staff say you're asking for fish at every meal.

You know we don't have any

and you don't have any at home either.

- So, I'm not gonna get a fish sandwich

at my going away party?

It's fishy, I mean, who's hiding all those fish?

You, the government, the Japanese?

- Mr Baker, I need to know whether or not

you think there are any fish to eat.

It's for cognitive purposes,

it's very important that I know this.

Please answer the question.

- A smart doctor like you doesn't know?

- I'd like you to tell me.

- If this was a game show, I could win a bunch of money.

- You don't know, do you?

- Oh no, sorry to report to the world,

but as predicted by many fishy scientists,

we have fished all the fishies.

Well, almost all the fishies.

Any that are left are kinda hard to find,

unless you have enough money.

Then you can treat yourself

to some of the old frozen stocks.

And great news folks, we still have plenty of jellyfishies.

Oh, get ready, 'cause we're about to learn to cook

and eat jellyfish, and in other related news,

those tiny little ocean phytoplankton thingies,

well they're dyin' off too,

but no big deal, I mean,

they just make half of our oxygen.

We still have the other half, right?

No problemo, just skip every other breath, folks.

You'll be sound as a pound.

- Thank you, thank you, Mr Baker,

that was an excellent explanation.

I remember when I was just a kid,

they warned us about the fish.

Really screwed that up, didn't we?

Couldn't be bothered, I guess.

- It wasn't just the fish.

They warned us about everything, really.

I mean, you're the psychiatrist, you tell me.

Why did we ignore it all?

Really, indulge me, no BS.

- Okay, think about it like this.

What do you get when you mix a lot of shortsightedness

with a little selfishness and just a dash of apathy,

and oh, no shortage of scientific illiteracy,

and don't forget, a whole lot of power and technology, too.

In my opinion, we're two hairs short of being chimpanzees.

We're extremely emotional, with powerful, primitive,

shortsighted survival drives,

and in the blink of an evolutionary eye,

we developed this powerful technology

that completely changed the shape of the planet.

Anyway, let's get back to business.

Probably do need to discharge Mr Baker

and some of the other patients, too.

Beds are full and the waiting list

isn't getting any shorter.

We have what, 21 patients now?

Yeah, 21 patients.

- All suicide attempts?

- Looks like it.

Suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, suicidal gestures.

- I don't blame them.

- Are you all right, why would you say that?

- No, actually, I'm not all right.

Why would I be?

One meal a day, just one measly meal?

Rationing food and water doesn't get you down, too?

And I can't remember the last time we could eat three meals,

just like normal...

- Look, I know it's hard, but it's just temporary.

- Yeah, that's what they said a year ago.

I feel hungry and weak all the time,

and then the methane bubbles that keep resurfacing.

That doesn't worry you too?

And the plankton thing,

everything just seems to be crashing down all around us...

- Look, Karen.

The plankton thing's going okay for now, right?

Yes, some types have died off,

but others are supposedly doing okay.

Everything's going to be fine.

Everything's gonna be fine.

Really, just like us?

- Really, Karen, this is about us now?

- No, actually, this is not about us,

but the Department of Agriculture doesn't exactly

share your optimistic views.

I think you're trying to tell me what I wanna hear, again.

Do you really think they can figure out how to farm

so much food with so little water?

- Why are you so mad at me?

I didn't cause this.

- You just take what you want, when you want it,

and you don't care who you hurt?

- Are you talkin' about us or the Earth?

- Both.

We've been down this road before.

You make all kinds of promises...

- Hey, Karen.

Let's not rehash this again, okay?

It happened, it was good for a time,

but we both knew it wasn't gonna last.

- Sort of like our food and water?

- That's not fair.

I never meant to hurt you.

We've got more important things to focus on,

don't you think?

- I know, I'm sorry, I'm just frustrated.

I don't understand how we let everything get so bad.

- You're back to talking about the Earth again, right?

- Yes, yes, the Earth.

You know, my parents were educated people,

just totally oblivious.

We grew up with so much water and food

we didn't know what to do,

and all the while this whole little mess was brewing.

We ended up turning our one little planet

completely upside down.

- When I was growing up, my folks used to tell me

oh, these are problems in third world countries,

it'll never happen here.

It's the elephant in the room and we all just ignored it.

- Jesus, elephants.

I mean I think there's one left in a zoo somewhere.

Call it what you want,

but we created this mess on our own,

with a mass extinction to boot.

You know, my folks had eight frickin' kids, eight!

Don't get me wrong, I love my parents

and my brothers and my sisters,

but what the hell, right?

It's like we're a plague!

- Karen, calm down, right now.

This isn't helping anything.

The experts, they're getting on top of this.

Let's stick to the facts,

you know, take it a day at a time.

You know what, why don't you take tomorrow off and relax?

- I was planning on it.

- You've got a lot of frozen food.

Why don't you sit down to a big meal

and forget any of this is even happening?

We'll get you back in shape, okay?

- Yeah, sure.

- Karen, I still care about you, I always have...

- Don't, please don't.

I'm sorry I even brought it up.

- Karen...

- Thank you for everything, really.

Goodbye, Jerry.

- Morning Susan, what's on my plate today?

- Well, we are understaffed and completely full.

It's gonna be a crazy day today, no pun intended.

- Well, when it rains, it pours.

When you see Karen, just send her to my office?

- Jerry, Karen's not,

didn't you hear?

- Hear what?

- Her sister found her yesterday morning.

She's, she's dead.

She was a good kid, sorry.

- Yeah.

- Well, that was very shocking and sad.

But in fact, scientists today are warning

that many of the problems in our future scene

could be upon us, and surprisingly soon.

Our characters from the future mentioned a mass extinction.

- It's the elephant in the room and we all just ignored it.

- Call it what you want,

but we created this mess on our own,

with a mass extinction to boot.

- Unfortunately, a rapid and widespread

loss of species is something that's

already happening right now.

In fact, biologists have classified our time

as the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history.

- First, let me start by saying that

we have millions of species on the planet

and they have evolved over hundreds of millions

of years into a fantastic array of different

types of plants and animals and microbes.

And it's really fascinating.

At the same time, right now we're undergoing

what's called a mass extinction.

And that means that the rates of extinction

are much faster, much higher than they normally would be.

- In the past, there have been five episodes

of mass extinctions in which the majority of the

plants and animals of the planet were wiped out.

The last one was 65 million years ago

when we lost the dinosaurs and a lot of other things.

Since then we've built up a huge amount of biodiversity,

and then in the last 200 years,

we've started destroying it.

- To recap, the Earth has been around for about

4.5 billion years,

and in those years, there have been a total of

five mass extinctions so far.

The Permian mass extinction was the third and largest one

around 252 million years ago.

The the fifth, and most recent one,

was when the dinosaurs went extinct

about 65 million years ago.

But now we're in the sixth mass extinction.

And unlike the previous five,

this one is the first one that is not caused

by natural phenomena,

like meteors hitting the Earth,

or major volcanic eruptions.

This one is different.

It's being caused by humans and our activities.

It's the first time a single species

is causing a mass extinction.

So, we're truly navigating through uncharted waters.

- We have a catastrophic situation

that's basically unrecognized.

In about the last 40 years,

we've lost more than half the wildlife on the planet.

- That bears repeating.

Over one half of all wild animals on our planet

have disappeared in just the last 40 years.

- I'm sure many people think

what has biodiversity ever done for me

and why should I worry about it?

Well, if you don't have a functioning

ecological system that produces oxygen,

that produces food,

people will not survive.

- Many of our crops, many of the ones that are

the most important really for our own health,

are dependent on an animal pollinator,

like a bee, to pollinate it.

And so, without these pollinators,

we wouldn't have important components of our food supply.

Pollinators help to produce 75%

of our different crop species.

That's how important they are to our diet.

As well as things we really like, like chocolate.

Many people don't know that cacao,

which chocolate comes from,

is pollinated by a tiny fly.

Without that tiny fly, we wouldn't have chocolate.

Personally, I think that would be a catastrophe.

- Even if we were to take a more selfish view

of not caring about other species or the natural world,

we should still literally be doing everything

in our power to protect and preserve biodiversity

for our own survival.

- If you had visited the planet three billion years ago,

you would not have survived a minute

because there was no oxygen to breathe,

the water was toxic,

there was no food to eat,

so you wouldn't have survived.

And three billions years of evolution,

of the web of life that makes the planet habitable

is what we are rapidly destroying.

- So why is this tragic loss of biodiversity happening?

- The biggest cause of extinctions is habitat destruction.

We know that all organisms need appropriate habitats

and when you destroy the habitats,

you are wiping out populations.

The basic cause of the extinction episode

of the sixth mass extinction is the much too large

a size of the human enterprise.

- Habitat loss is the number one driver

of biodiversity loss.

And what's behind that is really our population growth,

and also how we consume resources.

- There are several causes for the dramatic loss

of biodiversity we are experiencing.

For example, poaching is a serious threat to many species.

However the biggest driver of species extinctions

is actually the destruction of natural habitats by humans.

According to the United Nations, the livestock sector

is by far the single largest user of land on the planet.

And it is the major driver of deforestation.

Livestock systems occupy a staggering 45%

of the global surface area.

I don't think annual agriculture comes to mind

immediately for most people as the largest

land user on the planet.

But it is.

- So then, as we're eating more meats,

we're eating more of a product that really

just takes a lot to produce.

It takes a lot of land,

it takes a lot of energy,

it takes a lot of water.

And as we use these more expensive products,

as we consume more expensive products,

it means that we basically are co-opting

more of the Earth's resources for ourselves,

and that's competing with biodiversity.

It's meaning that we need to take up

a lot of their habitats.

- The fact that we, you know, this weird primate species,

of like relatively hairless, defenseless apes,

are destroying the only home that we know of in the universe

that will support life.

It's horrifying on a scale that we can't even conceive of.

Which is why, like, I feel badly for humans,

but there is a part of me that just thinks, that like,

if we can't change ourselves,

if we can't learn how to live in sort of

sustainable harmony with the only world

that will support us,

we need to go away.

And the other thing is, we will go away.

- In other news, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Authority, or NOAA, issued new warnings.

They are reporting that the oceans' pH is still decreasing,

meaning it's further acidifying.

This despite concerted attempts to regulate carbon

emissions and industrial and agricultural runoff.

- The newscast in the future reported

that the ocean was acidifying.

Yet again, this is another problem that we don't really

need to go to the future to see,

because it's already happening today.

So, what does ocean acidification mean?

It means the pH of the oceans' water is decreasing.

PH simply measures how acidic or alkaline

a given substance is.

But why is the ocean acidifying?

Well, because a third of all the carbon dioxide, or CO2,

that we are releasing into the atmosphere,

gets absorbed by the ocean,

where it turns into carbonic acid.

And it happens to be the case

that we've put huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere

in a very short period of time.

- As we are emitting CO2, a constant fraction of it

goes into the ocean and turns it into an acid.

For every pound of CO2 we emit into the atmosphere,

about 30% of it ends up in the ocean.

So, acidification is a very linear,

very predictable affair.

- The oceans' average pH already dropped from

8.2 to 8.1

since pre-industrial times.

And scientists estimate that it will drop further

by the end of this century,

to an average pH of 7.8

So after being relatively stable for thousands of years,

now we're looking at a total pH drop

of zero point four units

in only about 300 years.

And while point four pH units may not sound like a lot,

for the plants and animals who live in the ocean,

it's a huge change.

- Life, as we know it, has evolved to depend on those

very constant, very well buffered conditions in the ocean.

If the ocean turns more acidic,

it's a chemical environment that a lot of species

are not accustomed to because they've never seen this

in their species lifetime,

millions of years.

And, as such, this can really present

a large challenge to ocean life.

For example, the western United States,

there's a big oyster industry,

and some of the oyster hatcheries,

where the very fragile larvae of the oysters form,

had to be moved to Hawaii because the water

was turning too acidic for them to survive.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that

ocean acidification is already outside the bounds

of natural variability.

- Another creature that has attracted a lot of

concern for its sensitivity to ocean acidification

and warming is phytoplankton.

Why is that?

Well, for a number of reasons.

One of which is that ocean phytoplankton

are responsible for one half

of the world's oxygen production.

Half of it.

- So, half of all plant production happens in the ocean,

and that also means half of our oxygen that is produced

annually on the globe, happens in the ocean.

It's produced by tiny algae called phytoplankton,

which produce the same amount of oxygen

as all other plants in the world combined.

In some sense, every second breath we take

comes from the ocean.

- The further changes in phytoplankton that are projected

if ocean acidification and warming continue,

are completely unprecedented.

So we really don't know how

exactly it's all going to play out.

- In 2018 my one wish for Christmas

was some device that will suck CO2

out of the atmosphere.

But in a way,

I wonder if that would actually be the best thing,

'cause of course, we're on a sorta like,

collision course with disaster and tragedy.

I hate to say this, but we kind of deserve it.

Like, we're the cause of the problem.

You're the cause of the problem.

I'm the cause of the problem.

And sure, it would be nice to magically push a button

and suck all, well, not all of it,

a lot of the CO2 out of the atmosphere,

but what would we have learned?

I don't want a magic fix that will reduce CO2,

I want us to stop treating this planet

like a garbage dump,

and I want us to stop pretending that there

is some, like, plan B, some other planet we can move to.

Like, I'm sorry Elon Musk, Mars is not a viable solution.

You can't move eight billion people to Mars,

which does not support life.

- Sorry to report to the world, but

as predicted by many fishy scientists,

we have fished all the fishies,

well almost all the fishies.

Any that are left are kinda hard to find.

Unless you have enough money.

Then you can treat yourself

to some of the old frozen stocks.

- We saw in our future world,

that fish were very hard to come by.

This is based on a simple reality.

We're taking too much life out of the ocean,

while dumping too many harmful things into it.

The World Economic Forum recently issued

a sobering prediction.

With a business as usual scenario,

by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

The pervasiveness of plastic seems to have really

snuck up on us.

It's a manmade substance, first created in 1907,

but now, barely a century later,

it's literally everywhere.

Most plastic is never recycled either.

In fact, a lot of it can't be recycled,

even if we wanted to,

because of certain components that are used in its making.

According to the United Nations, more than eight million

metric tons of plastic find their way

to the ocean every year.

That's the equivalent of dumping

1,440 garbage trucks of plastic

into the sea every single day.

- Plastic doesn't break down.

It stays in the environment and accumulates.

The more we dump in, the more there is.

It doesn't go away.

It breaks into smaller and smaller pieces,

but those micro-plastics remain and they have toxic effects

that we don't even really understand,

we are only beginning to study now.

Including their effects on humans.

For example, if you eat a muscle, or any shellfish

or any product from the sea is almost guaranteed now

to have little plastic filaments in them.

Because the plastic is everywhere

and is being fed upon by these animals.

- Scientists have even measured the proportion of plastic

mass to the proportion of plankton mass in the ocean

and in some places, like the North Pacific Gyre,

they found there was six times more plastic than plankton.

So we're really turning the oceans into a plastic soup.

- You find plastic in almost all seafood now.

So, when you take a muscle from Halifax Harbor,

it has about 100 plastic filaments in it.

When you take a muscle from an aquaculture farm,

it has about 200 plastic filaments,

because they grow it on plastic ropes

that shed the micro-fibers that then

are eaten up by the muscle.

- So, if you're eating seafood, you're probably also

eating quite a bit of plastic, too.

Embedded in the animal's tissue,

even if you don't see the plastic or taste it.

A recent study from the University of Belgium

actually examined how much plastic seafood-loving

Europeans were eating and estimated it could be

around 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic per person, per year.

We don't know how eating all this plastic

will affect human health.

We've only just started to study this,

so it's still largely an unknown,

which is not reassuring at all.

On top of that, we've also seen that the nano-plastics

which are the very small plastic particles,

can actually cross cell membranes in some fish.

We've seen that they can accumulate in organs,

like the brain, testicles, and liver

and cause problems with the reproduction,

immune system, and behavior.

And this ability of plastic to cross cell membranes

is, in my opinion, one of the most concerning.

Because, if it's affecting wildlife,

I don't know how we can be certain that

it's somehow not going to affect us, too.

We've known about the problem of fatal encounters

between marine wildlife and debris

for a long time.

Since at least the 1960s.

But today, of course, the magnitude is many times

greater than it was then.

And now we also have more technology,

like cellphones with cameras and YouTube,

so it's easier to witness the plight of these poor animals.

With just a quick Google search,

you'll see clips and pictures uploaded

from all over the world of animals tangled in plastic,

eating plastic,

with plastic forks in their nostrils,

with plastic straws stuck in their noses,

birds dying with plastic-filled stomachs,

baby birds being fed plastics by their mothers,

who mistake it for food,

and even whales, stranded ashore,

starving and dying, unable to eat anything

because their stomachs are filled with plastic,

like this one in severe distress

in the last moments of her life.

I just can't imagine the level of despair and helplessness

whales and all the other animals must feel

as their stomachs fill with plastic to the point

that they cannot eat food anymore and die.

Remember this problem is all because of us.

100 years ago, there was virtually no plastic anywhere,

so it's a tragedy of our own making.

With a human population of 7.5 billion

and growing, if we all want to eat fish,

then over-fishing seems to be the result.

- Most fishing, prior to 1950, was coastal.

Few fisheries happened way outside in the open oceans.

That changed after World War II because of new

technology, more power diesel engines.

New materials for nets, and so on,

that made it feasible to fish way offshore

in fish populations that had never been fished before.

And what we documented is that within 20 to 30 years,

a lot of those populations became depleted,

particularly for the very large fish.

So the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

comes out with a report every two years

and what they've shown is that the larger

and larger fraction of those fish populations

is being depleted and right now,

about 80% or more are fully fished,

meaning their fished to capacity

or they're over-fished and being depleted.

- Using data from the UNFAO, scientists from

Dalhousie University projected that by the year 2048

all fisheries would be practically empty.

In other words, if we continue business as usual,

they're warning we could have virtually fishless oceans

in just a few short decades.

- Many studies have concluded that if we keep

fishing the way we've been fishing in the past

we will collapse many or most

fish populations by the middle of the century.

There was just a new paper last year that showed this again

using new data for fisheries management worldwide.

- When people are confronted with this reality

they sometimes think, well,

we can just have farmed fish instead, right?

Although farm fish, or aquaculture, is sometimes

touted as an alternative approach to commercial fishing,

in reality, it has its own set of very serious problems

and can still be detrimental to both

wild fish and ecosystems.

From destruction and contamination of natural habitats,

to genetic problems from the inbreeding of farm fish

that sometimes escape and pass on their problems

to the wild populations,

making them less likely to survive.

In addition, the crowded farming conditions

are a breeding ground for diseases and parasites.

One good example is parasitic sea lice,

which feed on the skin and blood of salmon

and can ultimately kill the fish.

Wild salmon populations have been severely affected

by lice spread from fish farms.

On top of all that, many farmed fish are also carnivorous.

Meaning they need to be fed wild caught fish.

I don't think farming fish is the most effective

or realistic solution to the problem.

A more elegant and simple approach

for all of us who have access to basic food options,

is to simply stop eating fish.

- I have some friends who think that like

by being environmentally responsible,

they're going to stop eating land animals and only eat

sea animals, fish and crustaceans and things.

Like, if you care about the ocean,

you have to stop eating animals that live in the ocean.

It's so self-evident,

I don't know how destroying fish

and destroying the ecosystem of the ocean

is somehow environmentally responsible,

but we're a messed up species,

so I'm not surprise that like,

someone came up with that terrible idea.

- My parents were educated people, just totally oblivious.

And all the while, this whole little mess was brewing.

We ended up turning our one little planet

completely upside down.

- Our rapidly growing population is a multiplier that

affects every global environmental issue we face.

The fact is, we've had an unprecedented spike

in our population over the last two centuries.

That, coupled with our consumption patterns,

is placing serious strain on our planet's finite

natural resources and ecosystems

- The number of people on the planet would not matter

if we were ethereal beings.

What matters is the combination of the number of people

and their economic activity, namely consumption

and waste products.

- Our species, modern humans, has been around

for about 200,000 years.

And it took us all that time to reach a population of

one billion, which we finally did relatively recently,

in the early 1800s.

But today, only about 200 years after that,

we've multiplied seven times over.

We're not more than 7.5 billion humans

and on track to hit close to ten billion by the year 2050.

- I'm concerned about population,

because if you look over all of human history,

it took up until the 1800s to reach

the first one billion people on Earth.

And the last one billion people,

to go from six to seven billion people on Earth,

took only about 12 years.

- Why did our population grow so quickly in just

the last two centuries?

Well, simply put, we've had the very good fortune

of being able to decrease child mortality

and increase our life expectancies

as a result of the agricultural revolution

and technological advances in modern medicine.

So more children now grow up,

live longer and have children of their own.

And this in the aggregate dramatically increased

the world population in a short period of time.

- Every year we're adding about 80 million

extra people to the planet,

and that is about the population of Germany.

So, if you think about the need to find a good

home for those people,

to ensure that they have access to food,

that they have access to clean water,

that they have healthcare and education.

It really puts things into perspective.

- When I was born, in 1932,

there were two billion people on the planet,

now there are 7.5 billion people.

The size of the human population has more than tripled

in my one lifetime.

One of the really critical things,

the resource that we'll never run out of, is morons.

Morons, for instance, say,

it's only consumption, it's not the

number of people that counts.

That's like saying the area of a rectangle

is determined only by its width, not by its length.

Certainly, consumption is a big problem,

so is population size.

The two multiply together to give you your impact

on your life support systems.

- Never in human history, have we asked so much

of our environment, our infrastructure, and our society

to accommodate such large increases in our population

over such a short period of time.

Just as one example, at the pace we are currently

growing our population, we need to be building

63 thousand new classrooms every single week,

repeatedly, week after week,

if we want every child to have access to education.

Funding, building, and staffing 63 thousand new

classrooms every single week, over and over.

So are we building them?

And are we prepared to keep building at that pace

every single week?

The answer is no, unfortunately we are not building them.

And I don't think it's realistic

to think that we could at that pace.

- The impact of human beings on the planet

doubles every 17 years.

That is, if you take the rate of population growth,

and add to it the rate of economic growth,

and put those two things together,

we make twice the impact on the planet every 17 years

and you can't do that for many doublings before

you destroy the planet.

- A lot of people think the population problem

is too many Indians, or too many people in Africa and so on.

Actually, it's too many people in the United States

to start out with.

You and I consume much more than the average person

in Africa or the average person in India.

And that's part of the problem.

To support the people we have today,

the current estimate is you'd need

one and a half Earths to do it.

To support the people we have today

at the style of the average American,

you would need four or five more Earths.

We're living on our capital, not on our interest.

It's as if we were an idiot child that inherited

a million dollars and kept writing bigger checks

on the bank account every year,

and never looking at the balance.

We're using up our precious soils,

we're using up our easily accessible resources.

Basically, we're behaving like idiots,

because we're the only species we know of

that is determinedly set out to destroy itself.

- Supposing the moon had water and an atmosphere,

and we had a cheap way of getting there.

At the present rate of population growth,

we'd fill it up in 10 years.

It wouldn't help us.

- Given the fundamental importance that our population

plays in so many converging environmental issues,

you would think that environmental organizations

would be having a robust conversation about it,

yet most don't talk about population growth that much,

if at all.

- If you think about any controversial topic,

people are always aware of difficult subjects

and if they bring those difficult subjects up,

it may get them into trouble.

So, if you go to a dinner party and you bring up

population and people jump all over you,

you'll say, okay I won't touch that again.

- There are a few reasons why people are afraid

to talk about population, but I thing at the heart of it

because there have been some coercive population programs

and policies, people are afraid that if they

make these links between population and the environment,

that it's suggesting that we have to control the population,

that there has to be some external force.

But, good population policies and programs respect what

couples want and they're about giving women and men

what they want and not telling people what to do.

- In talking about the very real problem of

unsustainable population growth, I believe

the focus needs to be on raising the awareness of the issue,

promoting gender equality and women's rights

around the world, supporting things like family planning,

so that all women have the means to determine

the number and spacing of their children,

encouraging small family norms, supporting adoption efforts,

increasing education, eradicating poverty,

and abolishing horrid practices like child marriages.

These human rights efforts are critically important

in their own right, but they also happen to be

some of the most effective actions we can take

to help slow our population growth rate.

Also, in our culture, there are still sometimes

some religious or social pressures that can make

people feel like they have to have children,

or they have to have a certain number of children,

even if they don't really want to.

Even if you are capable of having and supporting

children, no one should feel like they must have children

if that's not what they want to do.

As a personal example, I actually underwent tubal ligation,

or permanent sterilization surgery, several years ago

while single and childless.

Even though I love kids, I just don't have the inclination

to have any children of my own, and that's okay.

But no woman or man should feel like they have to have

children simply in response to social pressures.

And for the benefit of all humans,

including today's children and future generations to come,

I think we have a moral obligation to raise awareness

about the unsubstantiality of our current population growth

rate and the importance of slowing that rate down,

as well as changing our consumption patterns

so that we avoid irreparably depleting and destroying

the very environmental systems on which we humans

and all other species depend.

- So, I think that the silence around population

has to be broken, and people have to speak out

about the relationship between population and environment,

that there is something we can do to slow population growth

and it will have drastic benefits for access to resources,

access to land, access to water, food security,

and clean air, stable climate.

All of that's affected by population.

It will be much easier to manage these challenges

if we can slow and stabilize population growth.

Than if we continue on a business as usual path.

- A lot of us, myself included, everyone watching,

most of us self-identify as good people.

Of the 7.7 billion people on the planet,

I guarantee you almost all of them think

they're a good person, and they're leading a good life,

they're like, lookin' after their family.

But we are not judged

on how we self-identify.

We're judged on our actions, you know,

and if our actions cause misery and destruction

and suffering, we're not good people.

And you know, I'm not God, it's not my place to judge,

but like, where do we get the idea that we're living good,

benign lives if the product of our lives

is nothing but suffering and destruction?

- Dr Cohen, you were telling me over the break

that these methane explosions are nothing new,

and you didn't seem to be entirely surprised

by this event either.

- Well, we've been monitoring this phenomenon for decades

and while it's nothing new, we have seen an increase

in the frequency of these methane bubbles

which is very concerning.

- Our fictional characters in the future were worried

about methane bubbles escaping from under the Arctic.

But we actually don't have to go to the future to see this,

because it's something that's already happening today.

In fact, the image we used for the fictional newscast

is from a real life crater in Siberia, thought to have been

formed by a recent methane pocket explosion in an area

that used to be covered by frozen permafrost.

Some places in the Arctic are starting to look like

bubbling jacuzzis, not because the water is boiling,

but because methane that was previously trapped in ice

is now bubbling up to the surface.

Some daring scientists, like this one from the

University of Alaska, can even dig just a little bit

into the ice and light escaping methane right on fire.

But why does it matter if frozen methane

is now being released into the atmosphere?

Well, it's a concern for two main reasons.

First, because the total amount of methane trapped in frozen

parts of our planet is truly enormous.

There's several tons more methane trapped by ice

than there is in the entire atmosphere.

The second reason why methane matters,

is it happens to be an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.

It's at least 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide

in trapping heat from the sun.

If this enormous store of frozen methane or a big

part of it is released into our atmosphere,

it could amplify the degree and speed of climate change.

- It's a very unusual kind of ice

that you can actually burn.

Also, of course, like regular ice, it can melt.

- It's actually methane trapped in water molecules,

but frozen and it's under pressure and at cold

temperatures under the oceans.

There's a lot of it, but it's deep in the ocean,

it's hard to get at, it's very unstable,

so people just generally leave it alone,

and that's a good thing.

But in the Arctic Ocean, it's more shallow,

and so we're already starting to see,

due to warming, the melting of ice,

the warming of the Arctic Sea,

we're starting to see methane bubbles

coming out of the Arctic Ocean.

And it's hard to say how much that is so far,

but we know that with further warming,

it's going to get worse.

- The good news is, when methane is locked under

or within a frozen surface,

it's harmless because it doesn't enter the atmosphere.

The bad news is, over the past century,

we've been putting a lot of carbon dioxide into our

atmosphere, which traps heat from the sun

and has been causing the average global temperature

to warm up, and as a result,

places that were once permanently frozen,

are now thawing, or thawing for part of the year.

- I think the danger of the methane is even though

we're starting to see the melting of the permafrost,

we're starting to see bubbling out of the Arctic,

it's not that it's a lot now,

but it's a sign of something that could happen in much

greater amounts in the future,

and therefore we want to stop it

before it gets out of control.

Right now, the biggest contributor to climate change

and global warming is CO2.

- So we refer to these gasses, like CO2

as greenhouse gasses because of this metaphor

with an actual greenhouse.

A greenhouse is a glass building that lets sunlight

come in and then it traps some of the heat in there

so it's warmer inside the greenhouse

than outside the greenhouse.

And I have firsthand experience with a greenhouse,

having had my wedding reception in a greenhouse,

in July, in Massachusetts, with no air conditioning.

So, they work.

In fact, on our planet, if we didn't have CO2 and those

greenhouse gasses, the planet would freeze over.

It would freeze over, from the pole down to the equator.

- The problem is that in a very short period of time

we have rapidly increased the amount of these

heat-trapping substances in our atmosphere,

not over thousand or millions of years

like has happened naturally in the past,

we're literally doing it in the blink of a geological eye.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere used to be around

280 parts per million for thousands of years,

until we had the Industrial Revolution.

And then, in a very short period of time,

less than 300 years, we increased the concentration

to over 400 parts per million today.

Ending our use of fossil fuels,

by transitioning to clean renewable energy

is urgently needed to stop this dangerous increase

in the amount of heat-trapping CO2 in our atmosphere.

And while we need to absolutely remain diligent

in the crucial task of transitioning to clean,

renewable energy, there is also another critical action

that is available to us as individuals

that we can all take right now,

that would have a significant and almost immediate impact,

and that does not require any new laws or technology.

According to the United Nations,

animal agriculture is responsible for more human-caused

greenhouse gas emissions than the entire global

transportation sector combined.

This means that livestock sector,

the sector that raises animals,

like cows, pigs, chickens, and goats,

produces more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions

than all of the cars, buses, trains,

ships, and airplanes combined.

In addition, the United Nations reports

the livestock sector is also the major driver

of deforestation in the world.

And trees are an important carbon dioxide sink,

meaning they absorb and sequester it out of our atmosphere.

In addition to continued development and implementation

of clean energy technologies, a mass global shift

away from animal foods is urgently needed

and would have significant and almost immediate

impact in addressing our climate crisis.

- It's funny, when I became a vegan in 1987,

my reason was simple.

I loved animals and I didn't want to do anything

that contributed or caused animal suffering.

But as time passed, I began to find out more about

the role of animal agriculture in human health

and in the environment, but especially

what has reinforced my veganism,

is the role that animal agriculture in climate change.

- Why are you a vegetarian?

I asked him and it wasn't even because meat's bad for you,

he said that raising cattle was bad for the planet

with cow flatulence in the ozone and the clearing

of land for the raising of cattle.

What are you doing to help the environment?

I'm eatin' the cow.

- It's your choice,

comedians and everyone else, you can continue to make jokes

about cow farts, or you can address the fact

that animal agriculture and the way it contributes

to climate change is going to make this planet

uninhabitable for us.

- One meal a day?

Just one measly meal?

Rationing food and water doesn't get you down, too?

And I can't remember the last time we could eat

three meals just like normal.

- Civilization has only flourished

when there is food availability.

Well, unfortunately, severe food and water shortages

are anticipated in the not-so-distant future

if we continue business as usual.

Global resource depletion, our own consumption patterns,

and population growth all play a part.

- There are three projections for the year 2050

made by the UN Population Division.

High, medium, and low.

If we're at the high or even the medium projection,

so somewhere between 9.5 and 10.5 billion people by 2050,

we will clearly face a food crisis.

- Right now enough calories certainly are produced

to feed everyone, so right now enough food is produced,

but there are these issues that lead to food insecurity

due to distribution.

Projecting forward into the future,

it's easy to imagine that it's less of a distribution

issue and becomes more of a issue that it's very very

difficult to actually produce all the calories

that will be demanded.

- According to the United Nations,

with our current population growth

and the current trends of a growing middle class

who are consuming more animal foods,

we'll need to double our crop production

by the year 2050, just to keep up.

The problem is our planet doesn't really

have the land to do this.

- We're currently using pretty much all of the good

arable land for agriculture.

If it's good land for growing crops,

we're probably already growing crops there.

There is some other land that could be turned into

cropland, but generally that's a bad idea,

because other lands are either sensitive forests,

or simply not suitable for agriculture.

- It turns out that feeding the human population

with animal foods is tremendously inefficient.

Animal foods require a lot more land,

a lot more water, and a lot more energy,

as compared to producing plant foods.

Keep in mind that we're not just talking about the

animals themselves, we're also talking about all the food

that has to be grown to feed all those animals.

And all the land and water that goes into growing

all those feed crops.

Animals are extremely inefficient converters of food,

meaning they eat much more food than they produce.

- Globally, about 36% of

plant-based crop production

goes to feed animals.

But only about four percent of that is actually

returned to our food system in meat that we eat.

In other words, there's this huge conversion inefficiency.

We're losing about 90% of the calories

as we go from grains to meat.

- You have to feed about 30 calories to a cow to get

one calorie of edible meat out.

So it takes... the cow uses a lot

of that energy just to live.

So eating meat is a very inefficient use,

in energetic terms, of calories.

- According to scientists from the University of Minnesota

Institute on the Environment,

of all the calories we invest in raising animals

for food, we only recover a fraction,

on average about 12% in the form of meat,

dairy, and other animal products.

- To state the obvious, it takes a lot of energy

and a lot of resources, to produce food.

There's seven and a half billion of us on this planet.

But what doesn't make sense is to produce all this food

and then feed it to animals.

You know, I mean, the only analogy I can think of

is like, imagine taking

1,000 pounds of corn

that you could eat yourself,

and instead turning it into tequila

and trying to feed yourself off of that.

Like we see how dumb that would be,

it's the exact same thing we're doing with grain

that we feed to animals.

- So it turns out we can dramatically increase the

availability of food in the world,

by feeding ourselves with the plants directly.

And this is an important humanitarian issue to consider.

- As I travel around the world, I see poor countries

who sell their grain to the West,

while their own children starve in their arms,

and the West feeds it to livestock

...so we can eat a steak?

Am I the only one who sees this as a crime?

Believe me, every morsel of meat we eat

is slapping the tear-stained face of a hungry child.

- And of course, eating animal foods also affects

farm animals, too, in a very direct way.

A couple of years ago, a slaughterhouse gave me

permission to film inside their facility,

with some conditions, but I was essentially allowed to

go in and film whatever I wanted.

So I grabbed a very easy to use camera and I flew there.

The first day, I filmed around the holding areas

next to the slaughter facility.

And the second day I filmed inside the actual building

where the slaughtering occurred.

And one thing in particular that shocked me

although it probably shouldn't have shocked me

because this seems so obvious now,

was how all the animals fight for their lives

until the very end.

Somehow they all seem to know they are in danger,

even in the holding areas.

One particular cow I saw the first day in the holding areas

was a beautiful, huge completely white cow.

And somehow, I think she knew that something

really bad was going to happen to her.

Because she was really frightened.

I don't know if she was able to smell the blood

of the animals who went before her, or what.

But she was really anxious and upset and moving around,

so since I happened to be there,

my reaction was to try to console this poor cow,

so I started talking to her

trying to soothe her,

and I spent some time with her,

and after a few minutes, she was a lot calmer,

and even her eyes looked more relaxed and

she was in better shape.

But then the next morning, when I returned

to film the actual slaughter facility,

in addition to all the other cows they were slaughtering

it came the turn of that beautiful and sweet

and completely white cow to go through slaughter.

And unlike the other cows before her,

who were desperately trying to escape,

trying to crawl up the wall

and getting up on the hind legs to avoid getting killed,

this white cow didn't fight at all.

Most of the other cows had to be shoved in so they could

close the metal door behind them,

but this one, they didn't have to shove her in too much,

because she just came right in and she kept perfectly

still and did nothing but stare at me

because I was right there with my camera

no more than like a meter away from where her head was.

So this poor cow, I think recognized me from the day before,

that I had been nice to her,

and I think she thought I was going to be able to help her.

Because she was just keeping perfectly still,

and she just had her eyes wide open,

locked on my eyes, like she was imploring

for me to save her.

But there was absolutely nothing that I could do.

I remember when I left the slaughterhouse that morning,

it was still pretty early, and as I stepped outside

there were lots of trees and the birds were singing,

and everything seemed so peaceful outside.

And I thought to myself, how unbelievable

that this world in which we live,

seems so peaceful and beautiful

and at the same time, this very world is also

an unrelenting hell on Earth

for the animals we use for food.

Every single piece of animal food we eat

comes from an animal who desperately wanted

to not be killed.

Because no matter how local, humane, organic,

cage free, grass fed, it may be labeled,

for the animals, this world is a real life horror story,

one in which they fight for their lives with futility.

And then ultimately get killed against their will.

- So you're slaughtering these remarkable animals

and it's cruel and it's stupid.

I mean, maybe that's basically, like when humanity

disappears and we have to write the epitaph for humanity,

like we'll have a tombstone, it'll just say

here lies humanity, we had some good ideas,

but basically we're just so cruel and stupid.

- Why did we ignore it all?

Really, indulge me, no BS.

- Okay, think about it like this.

What do you get when you mix a lot of shortsightedness,

with a little selfishness, and just a dash of apathy,

and oh, no shortage of scientific illiteracy,

and don't forget a whole lot of power and technology too.

In my opinion, we're two hairs short of being chimpanzees,

we're extremely emotional, powerful, primitive,

shortsighted, survival drives.

- The reasons why I wrote those lines for Dr Jerry's

character is because that is my genuine opinion.

Dr Potts said he thoughts the name for humans

should be "Homo horribilus" instead of Homo sapiens,

because humans have been so violent throughout history.

Dr Ehrlich said he thought a more appropriate name

was "Homo moronicus" because we're destroying

the very ecosystems that support us.

But I think "Homo oblivious" is my preferred name.

Because we're all just happily going along

in our busy lives, day-by-day, year-by-year,

consuming more and more resources,

running towards a very real precipice,

but totally oblivious.

- If we look at the course of humanity,

I see that humanity, we do a lot of terrible things,

but we're capable of doing a lot of great things.

And we're also capable, over time, of identifying

the things that we should no longer be doing.

You know, we ended slavery largely.

You know, 100 years ago in the United States,

women couldn't vote and children still worked in factories.

We all know what the right thing to do,

or the right things to do are.

We know what to do and we know how to do it.

The problem is, we're not doing it.

And until we do,

we're just going to hasten our own destruction,

and the destruction of all the other

creatures on this planet.

- So what can you and I actually do as individuals

that would make a difference?

Probably more than you think.

In our personal lives, we can educate ourselves

and others on the science and the urgency

of these pressing issues.

We can procure and advocate for clean, renewable energy.

We can minimize our plastic use,

especially single use plastic,

recycle whatever we can,

and put pressure on companies and our governments,

to promote the use of biodegradable materials

instead of plastic.

They already exist and many look and feel just like plastic.

When it comes to helping stabilize our population growth,

we can all support, in whatever way we can,

gender equality across the world,

as well as access to education and family planning.

Also, consider the planetary benefits of having small

families instead of large ones,

and please consider adoption as well.

Last, but definitely not least,

when it comes to the impact of our diets,

we can eat plant foods instead of animal foods.

Changing our diets is absolutely one of the most

impactful actions we can take,

and unlike many other issues,

this one is completely within our control.

And we can start immediately with our very next meal.

- So, I've been vegan for 31 years,

and when I first went vegan,

I was making $2,000 a year,

and I was living in an abandoned factory

in a crack neighborhood.

And I ate really well.

Grains, you know, like rice, oats, beans, vegetables,

fruits, nuts, seeds.

- Do you really think they can figure out how to farm

so much food with so little water?

- Why are you so mad me, I didn't cause this?

- You just take what you want, when you want it,

and you don't care who you hurt.

- As a physician, I can tell you that a sensible

balanced vegan diet also happens to be very healthy.

We can easily get all the protein we need from plants.

And when we eat plant foods, we also get fiber,

antioxidants and phytonutrients, which promote health.

And this is just one of the reasons why so many health

authorities are promoting vegan diets.

For example, Harvard's Healthy Eating Pyramid

says, "go with plants"

"Eating a plant-based diet is healthiest."

Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health organizations

in the country, is looking for ways to make plant-based

diets the "new normal" for their patients and employees.

The recent chair of Harvard's Department of Nutrition,

Dr Walter Willett, recommends you "Pick the best

"protein packages by emphasizing plant sources of protein"

rather than animal sources."

Dr Kim Williams, recent president of the American

College of Cardiology, vigorously recommends

a plant-based vegan diet to both his patients

and to physicians over all other diets

for optimum nutrition and health.

- There probably are some really good

things about the vegetables and fruits.

You know, it's antioxidants and

it's vitamins and it's nutrients and fiber.

That may be all well and good,

but it might just be that animals are so bad for you

that in eating anything else that could nutrify you

without eating an animal,

is probably going to show up better.

- Even the largest organization of food and nutrition

professionals in the US, the Academy of Nutrition and

Dietetics, has long held their official position

that balanced vegan diets are healthy,

nutritionally adequate and appropriate for individuals

during all stages of life, including pregnancy,

lactation, infancy, older adulthood, and for athletes.

- And only thing you know I always want to emphasize,

that people just don't survive on a plant-based diet,

they thrive.

Actually, the recent Olympics that happened in Rio

the only US male athlete who qualified for

weightlifting from the US was vegan.

Scott Jurek, the runner who broke the record for the

Appalachian Trail is vegan.

- My name is Josh LaJuanie.

I am from south Louisiana, a small town call Thibodaux,

which is about 50 miles southwest of New Orleans.

That's where I grew up, huntin' and fishin'

and doin' all the normal country folk stuff.

Found myself weighing 420ish pounds

by the time I was 32 year old.

Never though veganism would ever be a thing in my life

as hunter, as a fisherman, as a football player,

as a stereotypical macho country boy,

with a four wheel drive pickup truck and a shotgun.

I would have never imagined being vegan at all...

- No meat, whatsoever, you don't eat anything...

- No, no, no. - Do any of you guys

still eat meat?

- Nothing? - No, zero, or dairy.

- It has changed my life,

I've learned a lot in the process,

and ultimately what wound up happening is,

I lost 230 pounds and I have become an

ultra-marathoner myself.

- So Josh LaJaunie is a tremendous athlete.

I mean, he doesn't run marathons, which is 26.2 miles,

he runs races that are 50 miles, 100 miles.

And all powered by plants.

- When people ask me where I get my protein,

my very simple answer is food.

- We get all the protein we need from plants.

In fact, plants can actually provide us really

excessive amounts of protein,

and this is something a lot of people don't realize.

They think protein is only from animals.

Plant-foods is where all the health is.

- Plants have an abundant protein.

And not just that, getting protein from plants

is healthier for us.

It doesn't come with the saturated fat,

or cholesterol and oxidants

and things that give us more inflammation,

or are otherwise detrimental to the health.

- I think it's also worth mentioning that physicians

have also been able to reverse cardiovascular disease

with a plant-based diet.

The formation of cholesterol plaques inside our vessels

is ubiquitous on a western diet, and cardiovascular disease

is the leading cause of death.

So, it is the most common reason

for adult men and women to die.

And these cholesterol plaques start

forming very early in our lives,

even though the actual heart attacks and strokes usually

don't start happening until we hit middle age.

- We know, from autopsies

that kids as young as 10, 11 years old,

who die of other causes,

when autopsies are done, they already have plaque

buildup in their arteries.

- It's obscenely common.

There are pathology studies of 12 to 14

year old kids in the US who died for reasons

unrelated to heart disease,

but about 65% of those 12 to 14

year olds have early signs of cholesterol disease

in the blood vessels that feed their hearts with blood.

- This military study, for example,

looked at the autopsies of American soldiers

who died in combat in the Korean War

with an average age of 22, and it found that 77%

of the soldiers already had plaques

of cholesterol in their arteries.

So even if you look amazing and very fit on the outside,

if you're eating a western diet,

your vessels still probably have cholesterol plaques

that will keep accumulating and getting bigger

and could ultimately result in a heart attack or a stroke.

- If you're eating a western diet,

you're going to have heart disease.

- When you look at randomized controlled trials,

really the only pattern of eating that's been shown

to reverse heart disease, for example,

is a plant-based diet,

one that doesn't have animal products.

- That's right, this ubiquitous disease,

that is our number one killer, has actually been reversed

with a plant-based diet.

As an example, here's a published case study from the

Cleveland Clinic Foundation of a patient

who had a heart attack and was treated with nothing but

a plant-based vegan diet, with no stints

or cholesterol lowering medication,

and he was able to completely reverse the disease,

to open up the clogged arteries going to his heart.

There is also a lot of compelling data in the published

literature that points to plant-based diets being

helpful in the prevention of cancer.

For example, scientists with Memorial Sloan-Kettering

Cancer Center and others literally took petri dishes

filled with cancer cells and poured blood from people

following a plant-based diet into one petri dish

and blood from people following a regular western diet

into another petri dish to see who's blood could fight

off the cancer cells better.

They found that blood from those eating a plant-based diet

inhibited cancer cell growth by 70%.

But the blood of those eating a regular western diet

only inhibited cancer cell grown by a mere 9%.

So the blood of those following a plant-based diet

was almost eight times more powerful

at inhibiting the growth of cancer cells.

- The animal protein itself has been closely linked

to increased production of IGF-1,

insulin-like growth factor.

Which is very closely tied to cancer.

- Yes, among other things,

one of the mechanisms by which

animal protein is thought to increase cancer risk

is something called IGF-1,

- IGF-1 is insulin-like growth factor one.

It's a growth factor, it causes things to grow,

good and bad, including cancer cells.

It is something that we do not want too much of,

in our body. However, animal foods

increase our levels of IGF-1 by two mechanism.

One, animal foods have IGF-1 in them,

so when we ingest animal foods, we ingest IGF-1.

And two, animals foods cause us to produce

more IGF-1 though our own liver.

- Eating these animal foods or animal protein,

actually revs up the enzymes in our liver,

that your body produces additional IGF-1.

So if you have a cancer, and we all have cancers

floating in our blood stream,

our immune system is constantly recognizing these

cancer cells and taking them out.

What IGF-1 does, it makes these cancer cells grow faster.

It makes them proliferate.

It makes them easier to metastasize.

So it helps in the inception of cancer,

in the growth of cancer, and in the spread of cancer.

- There's also a direct relationship between some

cancers and the problematic hormonal content that is

found in meat and in dairy.

- Dairy naturally has hormones. So even if the

packages say no added hormones,

they can't say no hormones,

they can only say no added hormones.

Milk is produced when a cow has just given birth to a baby.

A cow is no different than any other mammal.

There are a lot of hormones when a cow has just given birth.

- Dairy contains large amounts of

female sex hormones, like estrogens and progesterone.

And that includes milk labeled as organic

or no hormones added.

Remember, those labels only mean no hormones were added,

which is kind of misleading because,

regardless of whether hormones were added or not,

milk still contains all the hormones that are naturally

produced by the cows.

Even pediatricians have expressed concerns

that "Sexual maturation of prepubertal children"

"could be affected by the ordinary intake of cow milk."

This study examined the rate of female hormone related

cancers in 40 countries and found that

"milk plus cheese make the greatest contribution to the"

"incidence of ovarian cancer" and that

"milk plus cheese make the most significant contribution"

to the incidence of uterine cancers.

They said among dietary risk factors,

"we are most concerned with milk and dairy products"

because their estrogen and progesterone levels are so high.

As noted in this review published by Johns Hopkins

School of Public Health, dairy is actually

"one of the most consistent dietary predictors"

"for prostate cancer"

that exists in the published literature.

- I do not recommend my patients to eat fish.

Fish is an animal food, just like eggs and dairy and meat,

and hence it's high in saturated fat,

it's high in cholesterol,

and it also raises our IGF-1 levels.

- When you're eating fish, you're getting mercury,

you're getting plastics, you're getting dioxins,

you're getting so many heavy metals.

- There are plenty plant-based sources of

Omega-3 fatty acids.

Without having to deal with the unhealthy aspects of fish.

- So there you get the Omega-3s, the healthy fats,

but you don't get the mercury,

you don't get the heavy metal,

you don't get the dioxins.

And this way, you know you're being healthy,

you're being kind to the environment,

kind to the oceans, kind to the fish.

And you're being also kind to your own body.

- The bottom line is, for those of us with access to food,

other than our adopted habits and convenience,

there's no good reason for consuming animal foods.

Collectively, we're not only imposing unnecessary suffering

and death on billions of animals,

we're also devastating the environment that

supports us all.

Our planet is special and it is quite literally

the only home we have.

This may sound obvious, but really,

shouldn't we take care of it?

Let's do whatever we can to preserve and protect

the only home and the only other companions

in the universe we have ever know.