Book Review: Half Earth by Edward O. Wilson.
02 September 2016 [link youtube]
Ecology / Habitat Conservation / Environmentalism / Endangered Species / Climate Change / Vegan / Vegans / Veganism
Youtube Automatic Transcription
yo this is a book review video showed
out to my pressure cooker scene in the background there my brand new pressure cooker this school normally does not allow students to cook or prepare food in their rooms but I talked to the boss here I talked to the managing director she's also vegan and she she made an exception in my case I think yeah I've talked with us on patreon I haven't talked about it on YouTube but I really have been struggling with my diet here in many ways and now that I have the pressure cooker in theory I can cook beans lately I've been cooking a type of grain it's called job's tears it's a high-protein grain about 4 grams of protein to 1 gram of fat hopefully that's gonna make my life here a little bit easier to injure the book I'm gonna review was very kindly sent to me about one of my viewers first book review I've done in a long time first time I've read a book in English in a long time one of things that's depressing about studying so many foreign languages is that you really do not spend that much time doing quality reading in your own language so this is half Earth a book by a famous and award-winning scientist named Edward O Wilson and this handsome hard copy cover a version of the book you guys may or may not have seen this on YouTube I asked one of my viewers to send me a copy someone who already had it who already read it sent me a secondhand copy because the costs of shipping and so on here in China this is only printed in America on the Western world somewhere yeah New York and London it just was impossible justify the cost would have cost me like 40 40 plus US dollars and as I could tell just by looking on the internet it's not that much of a book I realize it doesn't look too skinny but in terms of the amount of words per page this is a very slim 200 and some page volume which does not have a lot to say right off the bat that is one of the weaknesses of this book it is light now I have worked as a professional editor of nonfiction most of being academic non fiction and nonfiction written by professors and what have you and I can imagine the struggles that the editors have with this book it is very poorly written I mean I should say off the bat like for me it's red a bowl I asked for a copy of this book I didn't buy it I asked my viewers to send me copies but by the way the guy who gave the gift thank you very much but he he chooses to remain anonymous he said just just let people know it was sent in by an American viewer so thanks to you thanks to the USA um the title of the book is really the best part of the book it's called half earth and that's almost all you need to know about it the guys thesis is that 50% of the earth should be transformed into nature conservation areas protected areas biodiversity conservation areas whatever you want to say for the future of the ecological service of the planet that's all you need to know that's the best part of the book that's the concept that's it there is there is absolutely nothing else about this book that's worth reading or worth knowing and on the contrary if you force yourself to read any significant percentage of this book you run into many of the problems I had myself with career academics to give an example so Edward o Wilson he is a distinguished scientist he knows nothing about writing he's a very very poor creative writer but he also knows nothing about economics now the most obvious flaw in this plan or question I mean most crushing obstacle to someone who actually wanted to make 50% of the planet into biodiversity conservation areas into national parks or something of that kind is economic you know with a country like Canada it's easy to visualize because we have so much seemingly empty land in reality when you look into it that land is exploited economically in various ways whether it's for timber or for mining or whether it's disused abandoned land that's already been destroyed by activities such as timber and mining industries pulp and paper industry resource extraction but still you look at the map of Canada and think oh well hmm could 50 percent of Canada be national parks seems-seems viable okay let's look at a country like Tonga Tonga is poverty-stricken both in terms well it's not even such the poverty of the people the poverty of the government the impossibility of the government ever digging itself out of debt the impossibility of the government ever meeting the costs of things like health care and infrastructure and education and yes you know the poverty of the people the citizens of Tonga is also considerable but it's not the kind of acute and extreme poverty you might you know visualize from I don't know newspaper headlines Tonga isn't that badly off but there are very very real problem Shirley do you want to take Tonga the tiny struggling island nation of Tonga and making it to fifty percent of it into national parks how is that gonna work economically an example you guys will be shocked to hear me mention this this scarf is made in Cambodia by the way um you know how about Cambodia how about Laos about any of those countries I'm familiar with when I was in Laos again I did work inside the government and that's really not saying anything Laos is a communist country a huge percentage of the population are employed by the government but I did spend a lot of time talking to government officials and so on and I mean what Laos is doing that time was declaring special protected areas they were called biodiversity conservation areas but the reality was economic exploitation within those areas was intensive so trees were being cut down industries of various kinds were being pursued economic development was being pursued and those areas included you know villages and towns they weren't depopulated empty areas such as we in Canada can boast of you know they were areas that had indigenous people you know tribal people still living in tribes but also settled populations of farmers and a whole industries what-have-you and you know they say they're gonna declare a you know biodiversity conservation area but then what does that really mean in practice I'm completing peculiar Achilles heels of this book and it has many is the fact that it mentions the current statistic maintained by the United Nations is that already fifteen percent one five percent of the world consists of protected areas but when you look into that I think there are seven different categories of protected areas and in some cases protected does really does not mean much you know you talking about a protected area but it's actually being operated as a ski Lodge you know as a tourist oriented you know theme park the subtrees in it or something I remember last time the US had the Winter Olympics I I don't care much but the longest distance memory but I remember seeing a documentary looking at the national parks in that part of United States and how intensely they were being exploited for the Olympics and for tourism and just how weak their claim was to being a national park or to being a conservation area and these types of problems but I mean when you read the the few pages this has about economics it's just it's laughable a child could refute it when I was 11 years old I could have refuted this I might have been a very strange 11 year old but I mean I you know I really wasn't the boy genius I was 11 I think I was still playing Sega Master System and was still playing video games I was a normal kid but the economic argument is absolutely laughable it's it's complete garbage and it reminded me of you know especially in anthropology I would meet these people who had achieved some level of success and distinction anthropology they had PhDs they'd done research but then as soon as the question turned to politics they would try to show how sophisticated they were by making you know very edgy and extreme statements about economics economic theory but all it showed was that you know they were just pitiably ignorant they did not have a 101 level education in economics they did not understand the basics and they were just accustomed to going to cocktail parties with other people in their discipline and making these statements about economics and having other people probably have glasses of wine in their hands probably enjoying themselves who are not in a position to really scrutinize them even if they know better they're not gonna say it you know nodding their heads or acting amused or approving of them I mean you know really my feeling about Edward o Wilson he believed in the footnotes he says he first put forward this idea in print the half-hour thesis in the year 2002 I'm guessing that between 2002 and 2016 he's been to a lot of cocktail parties and he has just become very accustomed to putting this idea forth in the company of people who are not really gonna criticize him not really gonna scrutinize his claims and oh oh and love let me tell you what I have to say about economics and what the impacts will be in the fourth he is just not used to presenting this to any kind of crowd who would actually scrutinize it or even think through practically the steps are implementation now of course the irony is do I sympathize with the hypothesis yes the only reason why I have this book is that the basic concept appeals to me it appeals to me that scientists would sit down crunch the numbers and say look let's come up with a target where we have to draw a line on the map and really say this is the minimum requirement for different types of forests this is how much rainforest we need this is how much old-growth forests in northern Canada we need you that you're gonna grow it draw up a series of requirements so that wild species can continue exist and so that this is a United Nations term so that ecological services are still provided to humanity ecological services is a bizarre term it is heavily used by the United Nations but the point is that if we don't have enough forests existing then in a sense we don't have enough drinking water or we don't have the rain cycle we don't even have enough some of the things that happen with soil before us can be tremendously important for so actually again this is a very United Nations way of thinking about the world but especially in third-world countries that they're trying to assist very often UN programs will try to make up a list of what are the crucial ecological services provided by a certain type of forest and that may be everything from maintaining the the stability of a river system we knew that you want to prevent soil erosion you need the forests to hold the land together down to for example Forest Products non-timber Forest Products that indigenous people collect they may be tribal people who really earn their living from gathering of things in the force so where I was you know Ratan some of it resembles wicker rattan was gathered by the forest all kinds of things together before is obviously a very unbeaten example fir if you have fur trappers who rely on wild animals in the forest if you people gathering mushrooms that rely on the forest where you can actually itemize the ecological services so these are things provided humanity such as having drinking water or air to breathe and then you can try to come up with estimates for how much forest you need to conserve for those reasons and this of course the emphasis is also on how much wilderness and habitat you need to preserve so that the species themselves will remain intact well continue to exist on planet earth uh there's no point I mean you know every Oh Wilson is a terrible author the quality of writing is abysmal he does not think about what his audience needs to hear what they don't need to hear there are many parts of this book where it's just like he's getting into the definition of a term the meaning of a word where it's like anyone advanced enough to want to read this book couldn't possibly benefit from this discussion not just many many of the discussion many pages are taken up with software um nobody who is at the level of interest to read this book could possibly been affirmed he didn't think about his audience or who they are what questions didn't ask and then the other hand the really deep problems that are raised by this hypothesis are not dealt with it all or kind of laughed at it and run roughshod over economically I mean he relies on an incredibly weak comparison to the current and ongoing history of digital technology so many of you know about this there are these kind of fashionable statistics of pointing out you know on on the software side or on the hardware side how computers are being more and more productive with less and less material now whether that's the computer performing more computational tasks on a smaller and smaller scale or you actually want to talk about the amount of material you know the amount of metal being used or if you want to calculate it in a more you know abstract sense in terms of the the amount of data being processed in relation to the amount of electricity being used or what-have-you yes computer technology is an example of a sector of the economy where you look at just the final product you can have these seemingly very impressive examples of how the intensivity the the productivity the amount of you know output given the same amount of input seems to with time double or quadruple or grow exponentially at university my time okay great thanks yeah thanks for pointing out the complete obvious Edward o Wilson but we were talking about resource use and habitat conservation etc so um now let's talk about meat do you think that cows are going to become exponentially more productive in the same way do you think cows are going to produce more and more milk or more and more beef in the same way that the progress of science has allowed the same amount of meth and silicone and plastic to produce more and more data it makes absolutely no sense I mean there are other critiques of that that technology model I can remember the the bad old days of computers the first portable computer I ever lifted was an Olivetti port portable a solid steel monstrosity and the exterior was steel that you know an elderly person could not lift it would take it some people use two hands to lift this portable computer and of course it had an old-fashioned monitor and had two disk drives the true floppy disks back when floppy disks were actually floppy it was this horrible monstrosity incredibly inefficient compared to date today's computers in terms of its weight the amount of materials used the amount of electricity used etc but guess what the actual productivity of a human being using that computer is remarkably similar to the computers we have today computer I have today is much more powerful than the computer that was used to put a man on the moon decades and decades ago it's it's so much more powerful and yet when I sit down and do word processing when I sit down and write an essay it's not actually any more productive the amount of time it takes my computer to start up may be a little bit quicker but that's about it so again even in a business context if you say how much time does it take Edward o Wilson to write this book to sit down and type it at a computer with a computer manufactured in 2016 as opposed to a computer manufactured in 1996 the computer itself is more powerful but that does not really equate to more economic productivity this is one of many many aspects but obviously if we're looking at a social scale computers are not a representative part of the world economy they're a completely unique hollow type within the world economy and the concerns this guy has should be about would should be about you know if you want to make a table out of wood in the year 2016 and you think about the forest production the timber production behind that do you think that has changed dramatically between 1996 and 2016 the productivity involved in some ways making furniture out of wood hasn't changed that much in 200 years you know terms of what we rely on the ecological services the ecological footprint the exports yes I mean you're one thing you can just make a table out of plastic you could in 1996 also but the the economic reasoning here where he simply says oh well this is how the computer industry is transformed therefore this is how the whole economy is going to transform and in the future we don't need to worry about giving up 50% of our land for conservation of habitat it's totally surreal and totally laughable even computers do not really work that way but manufacture of furniture out of wood doesn't work that way and for vegans the most painful part is ignoring food you know sorry but I mean food clothing furniture in terms of ecological impact in the existence of human civilization on the scale of billions of people these are really the big questions sorry computers are simply not a question for the future of our civilization and yes you know the fact that you have billions of people eating cows and chickens is of such outstanding importance that even if you're not vegan if you're just someone with a sincere interest in you know the future planet Earth you you have to pay attention to this so it's again this is this technological you know dead end of reasoning that he leads us into what do you think do you think that the the technological improvements to cattle ranching and chicken farming do you think those will result in the future starting to mean do you think it's gonna result in exponentially more and more productivity for meat and less and less use of resources such as water we don't even have to talk about land and food I mean the food that's fed to cattle and pigs you know things are all ridiculous obviously they can't get more efficient well they okay they can get so slightly more efficient because factory farming can become even more immoral cruel and you know inhumane to these animals yes you can refine the factory farming process to be even more efficient to feed these animals less to slaughter them more rapidly to make them grow more quickly etc but even when you when you add it up on a global scale there's just no sense in which you can look to the future and think of the production of chicken meat cow milk beef pork is going to for example use exponentially less water x less land and the use of land includes the land that's currently producing feed for those animals so this is really offering a kind of dangerous series of techno philic delusions along with a thesis that although I sympathize with it is neither proven nor even discussed an interesting manner in this book so for me even though I'm very strongly biased in favor of this author I have to regard this as as a complete failure now how does this fit into the history of ecology and our times to me this is really like a kind of sad appendix to the games that have gone on at the United Nations if you look at the discourse on ecological sustainability at the UN the the crucial issue has been actually the delusion that technology can solve our problems the United Nation guidelines basically draw up that the world's population can continue to expand that the amount of land we're exploiting can continue to expand etc etc and indeed as you guys know from this channel from where else that the amount of meat we're producing continue to expand on the assumption that technology is going to increasingly render ecological services obsolete and reparable that somehow the progress of technology is going to mean that a city like kunming or a city like Toronto that's sitting on a lake will be less and less reliant on the water that is in that lake that ecological services are going to be replaced with time by technological services back when I was in university I read the actual United Nations documents that define sustainability and the basically the minutes of the meetings where they came up with this how sustainability was going to be defined and measured and what the United Nations protocol for this was going to be this is known as within political science the substitutability hypothesis so it's the idea that technology and human innovation can provide substitutes for ecological services now I probably do not need to spell it out for you guys anyone who has done five minutes of research this also falls in the class of ideas that a child could refute the extent to which technology can provide substitutes for ecological services is incredibly is it possible for human beings to collect their own urine and have a machine that processes the urine so that it becomes drinking water so that those human beings do not rely on rainfall or lakes or rivers you know getting fresh so that Mexico City doesn't have to worry about pumping up water from from deep well reserves yes that is true to a tiny extent but if you think that Mexico City could actually provide a hundred percent of its drinking water from processed urine you're insane I mean if you just look into it if you do five minutes of research on it you realize that this is not even 1% of the problem can be deprotonate this way that no actually from Mexico City and all of these over for the future of Las Vegas Nevada the question of the finite nature of ecologic 'el services whether we're talking about rivers or the forests that ultimately create the rain cycle for those rivers etc etc that know actually all of our civilization sits in a tremendously delicate balance and it's just not the case that now or in future we're gonna be able to flip a switch and provide fundamental things like water we're gonna provide water out of thin air you know to to replace ecologic services once they're damaged destroyed what have you I mean one of the ultimate examples of that is the reliance on desalinization plants can technology converts seawater into fresh drinking water it can but the cost is unbelievably high the cost and energy etc so then what you're burning coal in order to convert salt water into fresh drinking water that does happen all over the world it happens in oil-rich nations it happens to my knowledge during the drought it has been happening again in California but it's the extent to which technology can actually supply these services once the oil service is destroyed is incredibly limited so what can I say half earth the only thing you need to know about this book basically is the title some scientists came up with this idea that we should aim for the target of having 50% of the world be protected areas by United Nations definition were already at 15% and it's not solving any of our problems sadly to me this book raises many interesting questions but none of those questions are discussed in the book there's absolutely nothing interesting within the book so the book is a total disappointment to me this book primarily reminds me of one the dangerous delusion that people who know nothing about economics believe they have a powerful insight into economics because they've never been challenged they'd never even engaged in casual conversations about the topic they've just been going to cocktail parties the other people at page D's in their own field and it also reminds me of the dangerous delusions but the progress of science is technology itself delusions that are so influential partly because of the United Nations guidelines and sustainability and the so called substitutability hypothesis as if folks thanks for hanging in with me
out to my pressure cooker scene in the background there my brand new pressure cooker this school normally does not allow students to cook or prepare food in their rooms but I talked to the boss here I talked to the managing director she's also vegan and she she made an exception in my case I think yeah I've talked with us on patreon I haven't talked about it on YouTube but I really have been struggling with my diet here in many ways and now that I have the pressure cooker in theory I can cook beans lately I've been cooking a type of grain it's called job's tears it's a high-protein grain about 4 grams of protein to 1 gram of fat hopefully that's gonna make my life here a little bit easier to injure the book I'm gonna review was very kindly sent to me about one of my viewers first book review I've done in a long time first time I've read a book in English in a long time one of things that's depressing about studying so many foreign languages is that you really do not spend that much time doing quality reading in your own language so this is half Earth a book by a famous and award-winning scientist named Edward O Wilson and this handsome hard copy cover a version of the book you guys may or may not have seen this on YouTube I asked one of my viewers to send me a copy someone who already had it who already read it sent me a secondhand copy because the costs of shipping and so on here in China this is only printed in America on the Western world somewhere yeah New York and London it just was impossible justify the cost would have cost me like 40 40 plus US dollars and as I could tell just by looking on the internet it's not that much of a book I realize it doesn't look too skinny but in terms of the amount of words per page this is a very slim 200 and some page volume which does not have a lot to say right off the bat that is one of the weaknesses of this book it is light now I have worked as a professional editor of nonfiction most of being academic non fiction and nonfiction written by professors and what have you and I can imagine the struggles that the editors have with this book it is very poorly written I mean I should say off the bat like for me it's red a bowl I asked for a copy of this book I didn't buy it I asked my viewers to send me copies but by the way the guy who gave the gift thank you very much but he he chooses to remain anonymous he said just just let people know it was sent in by an American viewer so thanks to you thanks to the USA um the title of the book is really the best part of the book it's called half earth and that's almost all you need to know about it the guys thesis is that 50% of the earth should be transformed into nature conservation areas protected areas biodiversity conservation areas whatever you want to say for the future of the ecological service of the planet that's all you need to know that's the best part of the book that's the concept that's it there is there is absolutely nothing else about this book that's worth reading or worth knowing and on the contrary if you force yourself to read any significant percentage of this book you run into many of the problems I had myself with career academics to give an example so Edward o Wilson he is a distinguished scientist he knows nothing about writing he's a very very poor creative writer but he also knows nothing about economics now the most obvious flaw in this plan or question I mean most crushing obstacle to someone who actually wanted to make 50% of the planet into biodiversity conservation areas into national parks or something of that kind is economic you know with a country like Canada it's easy to visualize because we have so much seemingly empty land in reality when you look into it that land is exploited economically in various ways whether it's for timber or for mining or whether it's disused abandoned land that's already been destroyed by activities such as timber and mining industries pulp and paper industry resource extraction but still you look at the map of Canada and think oh well hmm could 50 percent of Canada be national parks seems-seems viable okay let's look at a country like Tonga Tonga is poverty-stricken both in terms well it's not even such the poverty of the people the poverty of the government the impossibility of the government ever digging itself out of debt the impossibility of the government ever meeting the costs of things like health care and infrastructure and education and yes you know the poverty of the people the citizens of Tonga is also considerable but it's not the kind of acute and extreme poverty you might you know visualize from I don't know newspaper headlines Tonga isn't that badly off but there are very very real problem Shirley do you want to take Tonga the tiny struggling island nation of Tonga and making it to fifty percent of it into national parks how is that gonna work economically an example you guys will be shocked to hear me mention this this scarf is made in Cambodia by the way um you know how about Cambodia how about Laos about any of those countries I'm familiar with when I was in Laos again I did work inside the government and that's really not saying anything Laos is a communist country a huge percentage of the population are employed by the government but I did spend a lot of time talking to government officials and so on and I mean what Laos is doing that time was declaring special protected areas they were called biodiversity conservation areas but the reality was economic exploitation within those areas was intensive so trees were being cut down industries of various kinds were being pursued economic development was being pursued and those areas included you know villages and towns they weren't depopulated empty areas such as we in Canada can boast of you know they were areas that had indigenous people you know tribal people still living in tribes but also settled populations of farmers and a whole industries what-have-you and you know they say they're gonna declare a you know biodiversity conservation area but then what does that really mean in practice I'm completing peculiar Achilles heels of this book and it has many is the fact that it mentions the current statistic maintained by the United Nations is that already fifteen percent one five percent of the world consists of protected areas but when you look into that I think there are seven different categories of protected areas and in some cases protected does really does not mean much you know you talking about a protected area but it's actually being operated as a ski Lodge you know as a tourist oriented you know theme park the subtrees in it or something I remember last time the US had the Winter Olympics I I don't care much but the longest distance memory but I remember seeing a documentary looking at the national parks in that part of United States and how intensely they were being exploited for the Olympics and for tourism and just how weak their claim was to being a national park or to being a conservation area and these types of problems but I mean when you read the the few pages this has about economics it's just it's laughable a child could refute it when I was 11 years old I could have refuted this I might have been a very strange 11 year old but I mean I you know I really wasn't the boy genius I was 11 I think I was still playing Sega Master System and was still playing video games I was a normal kid but the economic argument is absolutely laughable it's it's complete garbage and it reminded me of you know especially in anthropology I would meet these people who had achieved some level of success and distinction anthropology they had PhDs they'd done research but then as soon as the question turned to politics they would try to show how sophisticated they were by making you know very edgy and extreme statements about economics economic theory but all it showed was that you know they were just pitiably ignorant they did not have a 101 level education in economics they did not understand the basics and they were just accustomed to going to cocktail parties with other people in their discipline and making these statements about economics and having other people probably have glasses of wine in their hands probably enjoying themselves who are not in a position to really scrutinize them even if they know better they're not gonna say it you know nodding their heads or acting amused or approving of them I mean you know really my feeling about Edward o Wilson he believed in the footnotes he says he first put forward this idea in print the half-hour thesis in the year 2002 I'm guessing that between 2002 and 2016 he's been to a lot of cocktail parties and he has just become very accustomed to putting this idea forth in the company of people who are not really gonna criticize him not really gonna scrutinize his claims and oh oh and love let me tell you what I have to say about economics and what the impacts will be in the fourth he is just not used to presenting this to any kind of crowd who would actually scrutinize it or even think through practically the steps are implementation now of course the irony is do I sympathize with the hypothesis yes the only reason why I have this book is that the basic concept appeals to me it appeals to me that scientists would sit down crunch the numbers and say look let's come up with a target where we have to draw a line on the map and really say this is the minimum requirement for different types of forests this is how much rainforest we need this is how much old-growth forests in northern Canada we need you that you're gonna grow it draw up a series of requirements so that wild species can continue exist and so that this is a United Nations term so that ecological services are still provided to humanity ecological services is a bizarre term it is heavily used by the United Nations but the point is that if we don't have enough forests existing then in a sense we don't have enough drinking water or we don't have the rain cycle we don't even have enough some of the things that happen with soil before us can be tremendously important for so actually again this is a very United Nations way of thinking about the world but especially in third-world countries that they're trying to assist very often UN programs will try to make up a list of what are the crucial ecological services provided by a certain type of forest and that may be everything from maintaining the the stability of a river system we knew that you want to prevent soil erosion you need the forests to hold the land together down to for example Forest Products non-timber Forest Products that indigenous people collect they may be tribal people who really earn their living from gathering of things in the force so where I was you know Ratan some of it resembles wicker rattan was gathered by the forest all kinds of things together before is obviously a very unbeaten example fir if you have fur trappers who rely on wild animals in the forest if you people gathering mushrooms that rely on the forest where you can actually itemize the ecological services so these are things provided humanity such as having drinking water or air to breathe and then you can try to come up with estimates for how much forest you need to conserve for those reasons and this of course the emphasis is also on how much wilderness and habitat you need to preserve so that the species themselves will remain intact well continue to exist on planet earth uh there's no point I mean you know every Oh Wilson is a terrible author the quality of writing is abysmal he does not think about what his audience needs to hear what they don't need to hear there are many parts of this book where it's just like he's getting into the definition of a term the meaning of a word where it's like anyone advanced enough to want to read this book couldn't possibly benefit from this discussion not just many many of the discussion many pages are taken up with software um nobody who is at the level of interest to read this book could possibly been affirmed he didn't think about his audience or who they are what questions didn't ask and then the other hand the really deep problems that are raised by this hypothesis are not dealt with it all or kind of laughed at it and run roughshod over economically I mean he relies on an incredibly weak comparison to the current and ongoing history of digital technology so many of you know about this there are these kind of fashionable statistics of pointing out you know on on the software side or on the hardware side how computers are being more and more productive with less and less material now whether that's the computer performing more computational tasks on a smaller and smaller scale or you actually want to talk about the amount of material you know the amount of metal being used or if you want to calculate it in a more you know abstract sense in terms of the the amount of data being processed in relation to the amount of electricity being used or what-have-you yes computer technology is an example of a sector of the economy where you look at just the final product you can have these seemingly very impressive examples of how the intensivity the the productivity the amount of you know output given the same amount of input seems to with time double or quadruple or grow exponentially at university my time okay great thanks yeah thanks for pointing out the complete obvious Edward o Wilson but we were talking about resource use and habitat conservation etc so um now let's talk about meat do you think that cows are going to become exponentially more productive in the same way do you think cows are going to produce more and more milk or more and more beef in the same way that the progress of science has allowed the same amount of meth and silicone and plastic to produce more and more data it makes absolutely no sense I mean there are other critiques of that that technology model I can remember the the bad old days of computers the first portable computer I ever lifted was an Olivetti port portable a solid steel monstrosity and the exterior was steel that you know an elderly person could not lift it would take it some people use two hands to lift this portable computer and of course it had an old-fashioned monitor and had two disk drives the true floppy disks back when floppy disks were actually floppy it was this horrible monstrosity incredibly inefficient compared to date today's computers in terms of its weight the amount of materials used the amount of electricity used etc but guess what the actual productivity of a human being using that computer is remarkably similar to the computers we have today computer I have today is much more powerful than the computer that was used to put a man on the moon decades and decades ago it's it's so much more powerful and yet when I sit down and do word processing when I sit down and write an essay it's not actually any more productive the amount of time it takes my computer to start up may be a little bit quicker but that's about it so again even in a business context if you say how much time does it take Edward o Wilson to write this book to sit down and type it at a computer with a computer manufactured in 2016 as opposed to a computer manufactured in 1996 the computer itself is more powerful but that does not really equate to more economic productivity this is one of many many aspects but obviously if we're looking at a social scale computers are not a representative part of the world economy they're a completely unique hollow type within the world economy and the concerns this guy has should be about would should be about you know if you want to make a table out of wood in the year 2016 and you think about the forest production the timber production behind that do you think that has changed dramatically between 1996 and 2016 the productivity involved in some ways making furniture out of wood hasn't changed that much in 200 years you know terms of what we rely on the ecological services the ecological footprint the exports yes I mean you're one thing you can just make a table out of plastic you could in 1996 also but the the economic reasoning here where he simply says oh well this is how the computer industry is transformed therefore this is how the whole economy is going to transform and in the future we don't need to worry about giving up 50% of our land for conservation of habitat it's totally surreal and totally laughable even computers do not really work that way but manufacture of furniture out of wood doesn't work that way and for vegans the most painful part is ignoring food you know sorry but I mean food clothing furniture in terms of ecological impact in the existence of human civilization on the scale of billions of people these are really the big questions sorry computers are simply not a question for the future of our civilization and yes you know the fact that you have billions of people eating cows and chickens is of such outstanding importance that even if you're not vegan if you're just someone with a sincere interest in you know the future planet Earth you you have to pay attention to this so it's again this is this technological you know dead end of reasoning that he leads us into what do you think do you think that the the technological improvements to cattle ranching and chicken farming do you think those will result in the future starting to mean do you think it's gonna result in exponentially more and more productivity for meat and less and less use of resources such as water we don't even have to talk about land and food I mean the food that's fed to cattle and pigs you know things are all ridiculous obviously they can't get more efficient well they okay they can get so slightly more efficient because factory farming can become even more immoral cruel and you know inhumane to these animals yes you can refine the factory farming process to be even more efficient to feed these animals less to slaughter them more rapidly to make them grow more quickly etc but even when you when you add it up on a global scale there's just no sense in which you can look to the future and think of the production of chicken meat cow milk beef pork is going to for example use exponentially less water x less land and the use of land includes the land that's currently producing feed for those animals so this is really offering a kind of dangerous series of techno philic delusions along with a thesis that although I sympathize with it is neither proven nor even discussed an interesting manner in this book so for me even though I'm very strongly biased in favor of this author I have to regard this as as a complete failure now how does this fit into the history of ecology and our times to me this is really like a kind of sad appendix to the games that have gone on at the United Nations if you look at the discourse on ecological sustainability at the UN the the crucial issue has been actually the delusion that technology can solve our problems the United Nation guidelines basically draw up that the world's population can continue to expand that the amount of land we're exploiting can continue to expand etc etc and indeed as you guys know from this channel from where else that the amount of meat we're producing continue to expand on the assumption that technology is going to increasingly render ecological services obsolete and reparable that somehow the progress of technology is going to mean that a city like kunming or a city like Toronto that's sitting on a lake will be less and less reliant on the water that is in that lake that ecological services are going to be replaced with time by technological services back when I was in university I read the actual United Nations documents that define sustainability and the basically the minutes of the meetings where they came up with this how sustainability was going to be defined and measured and what the United Nations protocol for this was going to be this is known as within political science the substitutability hypothesis so it's the idea that technology and human innovation can provide substitutes for ecological services now I probably do not need to spell it out for you guys anyone who has done five minutes of research this also falls in the class of ideas that a child could refute the extent to which technology can provide substitutes for ecological services is incredibly is it possible for human beings to collect their own urine and have a machine that processes the urine so that it becomes drinking water so that those human beings do not rely on rainfall or lakes or rivers you know getting fresh so that Mexico City doesn't have to worry about pumping up water from from deep well reserves yes that is true to a tiny extent but if you think that Mexico City could actually provide a hundred percent of its drinking water from processed urine you're insane I mean if you just look into it if you do five minutes of research on it you realize that this is not even 1% of the problem can be deprotonate this way that no actually from Mexico City and all of these over for the future of Las Vegas Nevada the question of the finite nature of ecologic 'el services whether we're talking about rivers or the forests that ultimately create the rain cycle for those rivers etc etc that know actually all of our civilization sits in a tremendously delicate balance and it's just not the case that now or in future we're gonna be able to flip a switch and provide fundamental things like water we're gonna provide water out of thin air you know to to replace ecologic services once they're damaged destroyed what have you I mean one of the ultimate examples of that is the reliance on desalinization plants can technology converts seawater into fresh drinking water it can but the cost is unbelievably high the cost and energy etc so then what you're burning coal in order to convert salt water into fresh drinking water that does happen all over the world it happens in oil-rich nations it happens to my knowledge during the drought it has been happening again in California but it's the extent to which technology can actually supply these services once the oil service is destroyed is incredibly limited so what can I say half earth the only thing you need to know about this book basically is the title some scientists came up with this idea that we should aim for the target of having 50% of the world be protected areas by United Nations definition were already at 15% and it's not solving any of our problems sadly to me this book raises many interesting questions but none of those questions are discussed in the book there's absolutely nothing interesting within the book so the book is a total disappointment to me this book primarily reminds me of one the dangerous delusion that people who know nothing about economics believe they have a powerful insight into economics because they've never been challenged they'd never even engaged in casual conversations about the topic they've just been going to cocktail parties the other people at page D's in their own field and it also reminds me of the dangerous delusions but the progress of science is technology itself delusions that are so influential partly because of the United Nations guidelines and sustainability and the so called substitutability hypothesis as if folks thanks for hanging in with me