Episode 19 The Big Questions

Questions. We're at Ashton Park School in Bristol and I'm Nicky

Campbell. God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish

the Earth, and subdue it. And have dominion over the fish of the sea,

and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth

upon the Earth. Well, whether God actually said these words to people

called Adam and Eve may be a matter of religious argument but there's no

denying that humanity has treated the planet as its own fiefdom, often

to the detriment of other species and the environment. So this morning

we're asking just one very big question, has man's dominion been

good for the planet? To debate this we've assembled some very

distinguished environmentalists and activists, theologians and sceptics,

writers and academics from both sides of this debate. And they'll be

encouraged by our very lively Bristol audience. And you can join

in, too, via Twitter or you can log on to bbc.co.uk/thebigquestions

where you'll find links to continue the discussion online. Well, last

week the Prince of Wales warned that economic prosperity was decimating

the world's wildlife. And the State Of Nature report revealed that 60%

of Britain's animal and plant species have declined over the last

50 years. Across the planet the level of carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human

history. And the most comprehensive review of research into global

warming found that 97% of scientists agree that recent warming has been

caused by man. Has man's dominion been good for the planet? Tony, it's

pretty bad, isn't it? It is pretty bad and those statistics speak for

themselves. And at a global level, not only have we seen a decline in

species in this country, we're undergoing a mass extinction of

animals and plants at the global level, on a scale not seen since the

time the dinosaurs went extinct. That's an evolutionary memory that's

accumulated over hundreds of millions of years being wiped out

literally in an instant by our demand for natural resources, for

space for agriculture. And now, on top of that, is the problems being

caused by climate change and, indeed, the acidification of the

oceans that's also being driven forward by the release of carbon

dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, some people might say, well, that's

the price of economic growth but I think that this is actually quite a

short-term project we're embarked upon because nature is the source of

all of our economic welfare and the more we destroy nature, the more we

imperil future generations' including the oxygen we're breathing

in this room, is put there by nature. And as you're hearing, Will

Travers from the Born Free Foundation, it's a very different

world from the film, from the world of the '60s when your parents were

making these marvellous films. Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna. But the

poaching situation in Africa, for one continent, has reached a crisis

point, hasn't it? I mean, not Africa but we have the tigers elsewhere,

but we have African rhino, the great apes, our closest, you know, genetic

relatives. Elephants particularly. Let me talk about elephants with you

because the demand for ivory from the growing middle class in China is

seemingly insatiable at the moment and the elephant crisis just got

disastrous, didn't it? It is totally disastrous and I think one of the

disasters is that people think that there is no crisis. Because there

was an international ivory trade ban in 1989, they think that the ivory

crisis has gone away. But it's not. It's there and it's as bad as it's

ever been. I mean, we're estimating currently 25,000-30,000 elephants a

year. Now recall that in 1979, there were 1.3 million elephants. In 1989,

there were 600,000. There's probably around 400,000 today. And if we're

losing 25 to 30,000 elephants a year... Of course, not in every part

of Africa, but across great swathes of Africa, there will simply be no

elephants left. And why are they being killed? For human adornment.

It's not as if they're being killed because they're an intrinsic part of

our human survival. For chopsticks. Yes, they're being used for

chopsticks or name seals or adornment. Or for iconic religious

purposes, particularly in the Philippines. It is a crisis but it's

a crisis that we're not paying enough attention to and, as you

rightly say, it's rhinos, it's tigers, it's lions, it's big cats,

it's elephants, it's sharks. A hundred million sharks a year and

there isn't one sustainable shark fishery in the world. We are taking

out 140% of the world's ability to replenish the environmental capital.

So we are running down the environmental capital that we all

survive upon at a rate that is entirely unsustainable. Give us an

idea, though... Elephants, let me get back to them because they are

universally accepted now, scientifically, as far more

intelligent than we realised in previous generations. This is, you

know, scientifically accepted. They grieve, don't they? Tell me a little

bit about that. Well, I mean, there's been some very long-running

field research, particularly in Kenya. Cynthia Moss's organisation,

the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, and over 30 years of study, both

into the language of elephants, into the psychology, the social make-up

of elephants. And it's actually replicated whether you look at great

apes with Jane Goodall or orang-utans with Birute Galdikas.

The more we study, the more similar we find we are with other creatures,

that we share the same emotional platform in many respects. And, of

course, people will say that's terribly anthropomorphic. Well, I'm

awfully sorry, I'm a human being therefore I can only describe it in

human terms. But I think elephants feel love, I think they feel fear

and hate, I think they feel remorse, very much similar to the way we feel

it and so do many other species. It's just that we don't have other

words to describe it. Yeah. Philip Foster, you know, some people blame

the religious view, the anthropocentric view that this was,

this was all made for us. Let me just put in an example because I

know that Tony's just back from Borneo. You saw the destruction

of... Sumatra.Sumatra, I do beg your pardon. There was a photograph

recently in one of the newspapers of a forest being cleared for palm oil,

for toothpaste or for shampoo or whatever. And there was a pregnant

orang-utan and she was clinging for dear life at the top of that tree.

Did she not have more right to that forest than the loggers? I think

possibly. I'm not going to dispute the difficulty with figures. Of

course, we're told X-thousands of species are disappearing. Um, yes,

we have responsibilities and I think it's a case in point. But equally,

um, let's put it the other way round. If we think about these

figures we're quoted, scary figures that we're quoted, I'm tempted to

ask Tony, can he name me a species that's died in the last five years,

that's gone extinct? Gone extinct in the last five years. Um, the Asian

mainland sub-species of the Javan rhinoceros. I was in Vietnam 18

months ago when the last one was killed. It was poached. And if you

go to Java where the last population remains, there's about ten left. And

across Sumatra, where Nicky rightly says I was a couple weeks ago, the

forest is nearly now gone over much of the island. The last fragments

are under pressure from exactly the kind of things that's just been

described, palm oil plantations. fair enough. Feeding global demand

for vegetable oil. How many species are there on the planet? About eight

million. Or 80 million.Nobody knows. About eight million is the

most recent estimate based upon the best data that we have. We've

described about 1.8 million of them so we're having to make estimates

about the remaining number, but there's something like eight million

species that share the earth with us and that tapestry of life-forms is

what sustains the biosphere which is where we are located within, our

economy is based upon that. We are as much a part of nature as the

orang-utans, the birds, the flowers and the bees, and the more we

unravel that tapestry of nature, the more we imperil ourselves. That's

what the science is now telling us. Is the problem, Tony?? Is, you know,

let's talk, let's touch on the religious here. Here's Reverend

Philip Foster, author of While The Earth Endures. Yes.Is the problem

that the religious view, that it's all about us? I don't think it's all

about us, but God. We are the people. Sorry?God did give mankind

the planet. But we weren't here first. No. He prepared it and gave

it to us. Now, that is not an excuse to go charging around the place

destroying animals. It's not an excuse for a kind of unbridled

rapacious attitude. Massacre.But, equally, we have responsibilities

but we also are allowed to use the planet. Now, the trouble with the

sort of figures we've just had thrown at us? I remember Paul

Ehrlich in the 1980s telling us that by the year 2000, 50% of the species

on the planet would be gone and by the year 2015, that's two years to

go, it'll all be gone. Nothing like that has happened. Yes, there have

been tragedies, and I, you know, I accept that. But nothing like the

scale that we were told. And what's more, the tragedies, when they

happen, are so often to do with poor government on the ground. Yeah.And,

I mean, that's a great pity. corruption. Yeah. The corruption,

bad government, lack of control etc. And poverty of government, and an

inability to enforce the law and so on. Now, that's a pity, but as it

gets this feeling that there's a kind of, there's a human population

explosion, we are some sort of cancer, a word, you know,

periodically used by some green extreme thought. And that idea that

somehow man is the enemy, against the planet. Well, excuse me, man is

the only species that cares about the rest of the planet. Yes. I agree

that economies do harm, in places and at times, but actually,

providing we fix government, which is badly needed by the people of

these countries as well as their gorgeous surroundings and their

species. We will have sorted out a lot of the problems. Will Travers.

I'll come to you in a minute. I want to address Philip's point about, you

know, we were at the pinnacle. Yeah. Speak for yourself, Philip. Will,

Will. Well, I just think that's actually a rather patronising

approach to the entire process. I mean, I work in at least 25

different African countries and, yes, there are governance issues,

but there are some incredibly hard-working, dedicated people

resolved, with almost no resources, to try and redress the balance and

to hold the tide of destruction that's going on. But you have to ask

yourself, where is the tide coming from? And it's actually from us. It

is us. No, I'm not buying rhino horn. Chinese people are. No, no,

no, us in the West, by demand, our demands. Yes, absolutely. You just

said it's Chinese demand. Our demand for global products. So, Sierra

Leone has just converted 250,000 hectares of rainforest into palm

oil. That's not being bought here either. That's being bought... It's

like India, China, that's where the major demand for those products is.

Not at all. Wait, wait, I want to hear what... We've got plenty of

time, everybody. We've got plenty of time. Carry on. Go to your

supermarket. And the quantities are?Excuse me. Excuse me.Go to your

supermarket and just look at the number of products that contain palm

oil, and then ask yourself the question, how many of them come from

a sustainable palm oil plantation? And the answer is zero. Diana, here

we are, we're the pinnacle, this was created for us. What's your view on

that? And Philip's beside you so you can speak to him about it. I can

speak to you if I see you. So I strongly disagree with that view. I

mean, human beings, in some sense, are a certain kind of pinnacle, we

are more intelligent. But if we were to value something like, you know,

how well you can pick up things with your nose then obviously elephants

would be the pinnacle of evolution, right? Yeah, exactly, so this idea

that humans have dominion because we're more intelligent. Um, I'd

really like to go back to the Jeremy Bentham quote and it says, is it not

can they reason or can they think or can they speak, but can they suffer?

And so even you can see how flawed human beings are insofar as there's

kinds of species that we consider important and not important. We

consider charismatic large species more important than maybe smaller

species or insect species, even though they may be just as important

or may be able to suffer just as much. Also for importance, for

ecosystems, as Tony has pointed out. Absolutely, yes. Ajmal, we'll bring

you in here. I mean, the elephants crisis, for example, is terrible,

driven by greed, in Africa at the moment. And talking about other

species, great scientists like Diana Fossey with gorillas, Joyce Poole

with elephants, Jane Goodall with chimps, Claudine Andre with bonobos.

Chimps, bonobos, very genetically close to us. And these amazing

scientists have observed these species and found that they are more

like us than we ever thought, in the terms of self-awareness. I mean,

there was a massacre in the Central Africa Republic recently, with

AK-47s, night-vision glasses, Sudanese militia going through, you

know, robbing them of their ivory, hacking their faces off, leaving

infants just standing there. These were elephants, for chopsticks. Does

that not offend you? Of course it does. As far as I'm concerned, God's

own words in Islam is that he has created human beings as the

"khalifa". It means custodians, caretakers of this earth. As

caretakers, we don't abuse it, we don't destroy it, we don't cause the

havoc. There is a verse in the Koran which says, and it is man's hand

that causes havoc on this earth. So we need to, of course, take stock

that we have done a miserable job, but it is also true that we don't

have any other choice except to inherit this earth. We can't live on

any other planet. So we better take care of it. We better take care of

this very well. Another statistic that we have not actually explored,

leaving aside animals grotesquely killed in different parts of the

world, did you know every twenty seconds a child dies in one part of

the world, because they don't have access to food or clean water? That

is because of greed. That is because of disproportionate consumption of

wealth. That is because of materialism that consumes our

society. I think there is a huge vacuum within us. That vacuum is

called vacuum of spirituality. We are filling that vacuum with

material, with greed, with other material wants on a daily basis,

whether it's in China, whether it's in Britain. I would like us to

re-think our position. We're the caretaker, a school-keeper. One

second. A parent of this earth. We'll tend to it, attend to it, look

after it, only take what we need and not abuse it. Current abuse has

become very sexy and fashionable. The interesting nonhuman animals and

humans are aligned. If we consume less, by eating less meat, more

resources will be available. Meat is resource intensive. We are sitting

here, potentially vilifying people who use ivory or who kill rhinos,

but it one of us, if we are eating meat, we are killing animals on a

regular basis and taking food out of others' mouths. There is an

important point here. I know Will is strong on this point. There is an

intimate relation between people thriving and animals thriving, isn't

there? Absolutely. I have used the words ecosystem services before.

Without going on about elephants, there are seeds that will only

germinate if they pass through the gut of an elephant. The forests

survived because of elephants. The climate that those forests promote

turns into water vapour. That water vapour falls on the grain basket of

North America and the Russian step which grows the wheat that feeds us.

It is as simple as that. As Tony said, if we remove component parts

of that jigsaw, we at the other end of the chain will suffer. There is

no dispute that we have to look after eco-services. It doesn't

matter whether it is because God gave us dominion or because we are

powerful people and it works well for us. The difficulty is with this

common idea that if we all did less, there would be more room for nature.

There was something to be said for that. But doing less is not true to

our spirit. Among other things, we are intellectually risk-taking and

an adventurous species. Whether we have evolved like that or God made

us like that, we will take risks. We will mess things up. I will shut up

when I have made this difficult point. We are also an aggressive

species! And I have had my coffee today! For instance, it is not

likely that the Victorians could not have done. Fuel, which produced

climate change. It is not likely that we could not do nuclear power,

which produces other risks. We take risks, and with luck, we catch them

in time and sort them out. A lot of these problems flow from our

adventurousness. We should not imagine that the cure for that is

somehow to become groovy, simple people. The way I see it, all of

those human drives for ambition and risk taking can be harnessed to come

to good outcomes on this crisis. Different ways of lawmaking and

technology. But deforestation is not a sign of our adventurousness. It is

callous. If you destroy where you are sitting, you will be destroyed

yourself. We are repeatedly pressing the self-destruct button because we

think that is good for us. That is what we need to change. Matthew,

from the Taxpayers' Alliance, what is your book called? Let Them Eat

Carbon. What kind of society protects these things the best? Is

it greedy societies? We think there was a huge difference in the amount

of greediness in different countries? Obviously not. The

societies which are most successful at defending their natural

environment are generally richer, more democratic, more capitalist,

more liberal. Those are the societies which are setting up

national parks. They are putting money into protection. If people are

poor and desperate, they will chop this stuff down. If someone is

choosing between going hungry and chopping down a tree, they will.

People like us can have this debate from this moral, disinterested

position. But if people are desperate, that is when these things

get destroyed. Look at what happened in the socialist economies of the

20th century. They destroyed their natural environment in a way that

has been seen nowhere else on earth. You are not completely wrong. The

one area that does not apply is carbon, the subject of your book.

The per capita carbon emissions are highest in the richest economies.

Sorry to grab the hot air from both of you for a second. I want to spend

time on that shortly, but we are still on animal rights. That is a

massive issue which we have to properly address. There is a

question he has not answered, our friend over there. Matthew.Are we

happier as a result of those things? In the happiness index published by

the United Nations in 2011, we are one of the bottom ones. Nonsense.

Bhutan is the happiest nation on earth. But that human rights aren't

great. Of course, I agree. So maybe they are told they are happy!

sustainable environment is much better. The Happy Planet index puts

Afghanistan above the UK, puts Burma above Sweden, Haiti and Cuba above

the United States. This is what environmentalists think. I would not

put Afghanistan above Denmark. I did not release that report. I want to

speak to a man who has a very particular philosophy. Let me bring

in Vinod Kapashi. He is a Jainist theologian. You literally would not

harm a fly? That is correct. I would like to quote one or two macro good

sentences from our scripture. " Those who disregard or ignore the

existence of life in air, water, fire and earth disregards his own

existence" . One of our other Scriptures says all life is

interdependent. We depend on earth, water, air, Fire. And in turn, they

depend on us. It is our duty to protect all life. We are not the

master of this universe, we are not the master of this planet. We are

the custodians is. We are the trustee. Because we have a brain and

intelligence, it is our duty to look after all and protect all. The

trouble is, it is bad science. is? It is bad science to argue that

we are in a web of nature that you can't unpick. As a matter of fact,

you can take out rate wallops of species, and many habitats boogie

along very well. The idea that this or that wino is crucial, it is not.

It is crucial if you want to preserve a huge rainforest, because

it will need a lot of territory. But actually, you can unplug that wino

from its ecosystem, and the ecosystem is not in bad shape. There

is perfectly good work on that. Richard, do you really not mind if a

particular species goes extinct? Whether I mind it might or might not

be a spiritual matter. But it is very poor ecology, but you do not

have an exclusive line on this issue. I disagree with what Philip

said about the earth belonging to us. Do you come from a rave

religious perspective? Kristian, yes. I work with Operation Noah. The

earth was created by God and it still belongs to God, according to

most of the Bible. And in Genesis, we read that God saw that it was

good five times before he created us. It is not all about us. In job,

there is a load of stuff that God speaks to jump. "Where were you when

I created this? " , so it is not all about us. Prince Charles said

something powerful about humanity. Yes, he said our humanity is less

than humanity without all the other creatures of creation. And that is

absolutely right. But we don't need a planet of purity. I live in an

island which is heavily degraded by natural terms, and much of it is

extraordinarily beautiful, including my back garden, which is one of the

most artificial places you could imagine in a natural sense. The

spiritual comfort and resources we get from nature can be nature which

has had quite a lot of human influence and still be thriving on

its own terms, not completely pure. Martin, after hearing from the Jain

gentleman speaking about his faith, Dr Kapashi, do you think we have

anything to learn from some of the Eastern philosophies? Very strongly.

The way you have worded this question takes Dominion as an

assumption. That is predominantly the view of about 50% of the

world's population, but it immediately ignores the view of

another 50% of the world's population. For example, the Shinto

in Japan we were at meeting on religious management of forestry.

The religion's own about 5% of the commercial forests worldwide, and we

were looking at protection programmes. And the Maronites of

Lebanon said why don't we set up faith protected forests? All the

Abrahamic, Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups said, that is a great

idea. The Shinto and the Hindu and the Jain went, what are you talking

about? We don't protect the forest, the forest protects us. There is

that sense that you are part of something bigger, part of nature.

With all due respect, all this stuff about ecosystem deliverables, spare

me. We are immediately making the planet something we manage rather

than have a relationship with. I find ecosystem deliverables a very

disturbing term. We are part of it. With regards to the Christian

tradition, if you look at the Orthodox tradition, not the Catholic

and Protestant traditions, there is a sense that we are part of

something. The orthodox talk about us being the priests of creation,

here to be a channel of blessing. A lot of our language assumes that we

are curse, partly because in the Abrahamic traditions, the

relationship of humanity to God and therefore to the rest of the planet

is considered to be a curse. The Orthodox tradition and many other

faith traditions say yes, but we could be a blessing. So much of the

discourse is immediately predicated upon Dominion and corruption. And so

we are following that path. But there are other traditions that

offer is a different way of relating. Will, you are looking

confused. I am not a religious person. But Richard says it very

well. There is a spiritual damage and to our relationship with nature.

While on the one hand, we crave it, and if you ask anybody on the

street, they get inspired by nature or wonderful photographs of a

natural scene, which speaks to them in a way that words can't, but at

the same time, we like to compartmentalise that and say, well,

I have a spiritual relationship with nature, but I will also drive hell

for leather for environmental destruction. But you are talking

about nature as ecosystem deliverables. No, I am not.You have

set separate. Because we like to be separate. That is the deepest flaw

in our thinking. If you separate yourself from something, it becomes

an object. It becomes something you have a relationship with if you

wish. If you say we are separate because we are more intelligent,

that is dangerous as well, because some primates are more intelligent

than some people. That is a fact. If you took it on pure intellectual

texts. That is an inconvenient truth for some people. If you take it on a

basis of intelligence, you have a problem there. We should not

separate ourselves from the environment. But human interference

is causing havoc in this universe. Our relationship is ruptured. How do

we repair it? I am interested in making sure the natural disposition

of human beings in Islam is that you are part and parcel of nature. When

you break it, you will never be happy. All the prophets of God went

to nature to find God. Mohammed and Jesus spent a long time, Moses spent

40 days in the mountains looking for God. My point is, we are part and

parcel of nature. We have to mend the relationship that we have

broken. We should -- we are no longer custodians, we have become

abusers. That needs to change. is natural about eating halal

slaughtered animals? What is natural about living in houses or having

leather shoes? There is nothing natural about that. It is a complete

fallacy, the idea about not having a relationship with nature. It is

about suffering, how much we cause and how we reduce the amount of

suffering. Wearing leather shoes? You are saying we have to be a

natural part of the world. But how can you reduce the amount of

suffering you are causing and be a part of nature? As we have said

earlier, it less meat, be more conscious of the four waist you

have. Food waste is not acceptable. Simon, hello. I feel in a difficult

position. Having said that, I don't think religion should be allowed to

interfere in the way society organises itself. You've said that

on a previous occasion. But, um, we have heard insights from other

religions. I was very impressed by the expressions from the Jain

religion. And I think we have to accept that Christianity has had a

very bad record. I think, off the top of my head, of the way the

Spanish settlers destroyed the civilisations in South America, just

as one example, and there are much more. There are many.And all I can

say is at least today we have got a Pope who has chosen the name Francis

and those of us who know anything about St Francis of Assisi should be

encouraged about that and perhaps this Pope will not utter a single

word about the sacred subject of sex which has dominated Christian

thought. But also, Simon, of course, in his opening address, if that's

the right term, he did mention care for the environment, didn't he?

did. And there is, as has already been indicated, a clear tradition in

Christianity that humankind, perhaps the pinnacle of evolution, perhaps

not, has a huge responsibility. The term dominion is, I think,

anachronistic. We dare not think in those terms now. We have to think in

terms of responsibility. There is also a tradition in Judaism, from

which Christianity came, which is still closely linked to and

influenced by the sacredness of all creation. And I am very much

influenced by a sixth-century teacher, that's of the Common Era,

St Benedict. And in fact, I am what's called an oblate of St

Benedict. That is, I am associated with a Benedictine monastery because

we believe that this sixth-century writer had some marvellous ideas

about how society should organise itself. He was very focused on

community being self-sufficient, being reverent to all things,

avoiding waste, avoiding conspicuous consumption, and that sort of thing.

But the point I want to make, if I am able to make a point, is that

we're living in a world which is not the sixth century. We now have a

huge amount of information which we never had before, a much huger

population. We can do so much more that St Benedict wouldn't have even

thought about. Should we return to the simple life? We can't, we can't.

No, we can't. We are so responsible now because of what's... The horse

has bolted. There was a lady back there with her hand up as well. Did

you hold that thought? I just wanted to, I just wanted to say that to

stop the suffering, we can't have this debate without thinking about

the over-population and the growth of the population. I was wondering

how religions would help the environment by helping us maybe have

less children. I don't know if religion can play a role in that.

Yeah, and over here. Good morning, hello. Hello. I have been interested

to hear talk about the economy come up a few times but I think that the

way the economic system works is actually a bit of a moral,

morality-free zone, also a spiritually-free zone. Although

economic theory itself works as a kind of orthodoxy of its own and I

would like to encourage both the theologians and the

environmentalists to get more involved in critiquing how the

economy works because I think the acceptance of an idea like ecosystem

services makes me nervous that they aren't really understanding how this

economic thinking is actually colonising the environmental

movement and we need to be very careful about that. And also we have

Fiona Harvey from the Guardian. We have so many problems that are

hitting us right at the same time, don't we? Absolutely. You know, if

we just had one of these problems then we could probably deal with it

quite easily, if it was just a question that we're wiping out

species, you know, then there are ways that we could stop that. If it

was just a question of we were over-fishing, we could stop that. If

it was just a question that we were polluting our air and our water, we,

you know, even in this country, we find ways to stop that. The problem

is that we've got all these problems hitting us at once and not only are

they all hitting us at once, but they're hitting us at a time when

our species is incredibly successful. And we've got seven

billion people on this planet today, and in less than thirty years we're

likely to have at least ten billion, probably that's an under-estimate,

probably about sort of 12 billion. And we've got to think about feeding

all of those people, ensuring that they have decent lives, you know.

Not lives lived in horrific slums, like, billions of people today. But

having access to the kind of decent standards of living that we expect.

And we are coming up against planetary limits in our living.

look at the rise of China and the power of China. I mean, the seas are

cleaned out now around Mozambique, for example. You know, because of

the Chinese desire for those fish. But can we deny them that? Do they

want what we have? I wouldn't want to deny anyone a decent standard of

living. Sorry?I wouldn't want to deny anyone a decent standard of

living, and it is possible for all of those people to have a decent

standard of living on this planet, all at the same time. But only if we

organise things very, very differently from the way in which we

organise things today. Mark Lynas. Hello again. Hi.Hi again. Author of

The God Species and Six Degrees. A lot of animals are on the brink

because of climate change. We're told a lot of people are as well, we

face big changes, we are facing big changes, masses of people are going

to inhabit our Earth and already do. We have massive challenges. How bad

could things get? Well, if we can put Genesis and dominion aside for a

minute, it's important to understand that scientists are now talking

about this problem in a whole new way. Yeah. And are discussing it as

a new geological era. The name that's been coined is the

Anthropocene. So it's a geological era named after our own species. And

it's important to understand that our species has never experienced

the kinds of things that we're going into. We've never experienced the

kinds of temperatures we're going into, we've never experienced the

level of ocean acidity that we're going into. We are the single

greatest agent of natural selection now because we get to decide what

species survive on this planet with us. And that does give us an

enormous stewardship responsibility and it gives us a responsibility, I

think, to bring about a planet where everyone does have the right and, I

mean, all nine billion people, have the right to live at the kinds of

levels of affluence that we in the West enjoy. And there has to be a

way and I think there is a way to do that without destroying the natural

ecosystems on which we depend. possible, though, that all of us

will have the same access to the resources and the wealth that we

have in the West today? I'm just wondering, is it sustainable in the

way we're going? There's a big elephant in the room. Yeah.

these resources are infinitely available. A metaphorical elephant,

in this case. Tony's just said there's a big elephant in the room.

My reaction is, thank God there's one left. Tony. It's the one about

global equality and the extent to which we can have great riches

co-existing with great poverty. We've got to solve that as part of

the solution to the environmental problems. We can't have

multi-billionaires living alongside people living on less than a dollar

per day. And if we're going to fix this, the aspiration that everyone

can be multi-millionaires, we have to do away with that mythology.

what do you say to the developing world who say, well, we have the

right to be as successful and as comfortable and as wealthy as you

are. We want resources. I think this is a matter for debate, for all

countries to be debating the kind of future that they think is plausible

and desirable for them. And I think this is then about the kinds of

conversations that are happening amongst scientists, among

non-governmental groups, between political parties, about how we're

going to be able to square this seemingly impossible equation. It's

not impossible. It's not impossible, it can be done. But it's going to

require a level of debate and sophistication of argument that

we've not yet seen. Since we're saying everyone's got a right to

consume like Westerners, it takes us nowhere. Will Travers. In a minute.

Will Travers. Well, I totally agree with what Tony said and I just also

think it's about choice. And I'll give you one choice. We can build

the electrified east coast rail line or whatever it is, the high-speed

rail link to Birmingham, we can spend �33 billion on that and reduce

journey times by what, about 20 minutes. Or we can do something with

that kind of money that would be a dynamic game-changer in terms of

putting in place the kind of qualities of life that we decry by

looking at the pictures in our newspapers but actually do very

little about. I think what's really wrong about this whole discussion,

from this question about population through to, you know, how do we

ration ourselves. There are so many environmentalists who applaud the

One Child Policy with all of its barbarity because they're looking at

this thinking, well, at least there's fewer people. We can fit

this on the planet easier. It's entirely the wrong way to understand

this. We can either get through this problem of climate change by

limiting ourselves, by saying fewer people, less consumption. Do you

acknowledge that is a problem? Absolutely. Lower living standards.

Or by transforming the problem, by the ingenuity which has got us

through crises in the past. And that's why, frankly, I would much

rather have a hundred million more Chinese people and maybe one of them

figures out nuclear fusion and gives us an alternative to fossil fuels

that's actually economical than not have those hundred million Chinese

people and assume we can keep on with the limits to growth. Fiona.

Right. We've had this question of the One Child Policy and I don't

think anyone here is actually advocating something like that.

Your good friend Jonathan? Jonathan's not here. You're getting

us to support things we don't support. Your entire argument rests

on a fabrication. Let's cut that out. On you go. OK. There are,

according to surveys that have been done, there are hundreds of millions

of women around the world who don't have access to contraception and to

control of their own fertility and would like to. Now the question of

how many people can live in the planet. Certainly we can have ten

billion, we can have twelve billion and so on, if we do it in the right

way. But the question is the way that population comes down if women

have control over their own reproductive rights. And I have to

say, one of the things about organised religions, down the

centuries and today, is that they've been very, very bad at allowing

women to have rights over their own bodies. They may want to have half

as many children, but it's so that they can give them three times the

standard of living. This population control will not deal with the

emissions problem. It's like you're saying, oh well, if people lag their

lofts, it'll mean we have less carbon dioxide emissions. People

want to lag their loft so they can save money and go spend it on an

Audi, right? If you ask women in developing countries... We can't

limit humanity to deal with this problem. We need to rely on what

humans are good at, their creativity. Fiona. If you ask the

women themselves in developing countries, most of them will say

that they want families that are smaller. For a higher standard of

living. The most that they want is a family of five children and that's

the kind of upper limit. They're not thinking about climate change.

want families that are smaller. That's what women want. Why don't

you listen to women? Mark Lynas. not a demographer, but there's a

very strong correlation between reductions in infant mortality. So

fewer children dying before the age of five from diseases which can be

solved, and fertility. So, actually, if you look at the global average

fertility, it's now down at about 2.5, 2.4. So we're almost getting

back down to natural replacement. So the reason why the population is

going to continue growing up to nine, nine point something billion

is because people are surviving longer, young children in developing

countries are surviving longer. And I don't think any of us,

environmentalists included, would say we want more kids to die, so we

are going to have to sustainably run a population of nine billion on a

planet with finite resources. Richard. I think the problem that we

will face is whether or not debate sorts this out or whether economics

sorts it out. I mean by that that that the poor world will get richer

because it's capitalist and knows which way is up and it's getting

there. Now, whether or not the resources can be found for that will

actually come out in the wash, to some extent. The NGOs will campaign,

there will be campaigns, the middle class will start campaigning about

the smog in their streets, the pressures will apply for all kinds

of environmental improvement, as the old, what we used to call the Third

World, improves. There is a weird question that haunts people like me

which is that, is there a point at which the rich world will have to

really impose limits on themselves, as it were, by law, on their

resource consumption? So far, we've kind of got away with not and we

can't say we're very proud of the result. We're thinking of taxing

fossil fuels etc. Maybe by the time we get round to thinking, God, we've

really got to deal with fossil fuels, it'll be a no-brainer just to

do solar because we'll know how to do it so well. It's not a done deal

at all that future generations, my children, my children's children,

their children, will need to do big government to sort this. Or whether,

as it were, where our current muddle, which is lots of economic

success, a good deal of technical ingenuity, some mess-ups, and,

please, not too much socialism. We just don't know. Diana. So we've

talked a lot about economic policy and about things like dominion. But,

really, there needs to be some consciousness-raising amongst all of

us. Our energy needs as well, we need to discuss that. Our energy

needs as well. But all of us can make a tremendous amount of

difference. If, culturally, we start valuing things like being

effectively altruistic, giving money to the developing world, helping

women get access to contraception, each of us can make a difference by

giving some percentage of our income away, by eating less meat, by

changing our daily decisions. It's not about bureaucrats necessarily,

it's about a whole society raising their consciousness about their own

choices. But only a minority of people think like that. This will

require is situational level change at the level of governments, at the

level of economics, by putting the right rises into markets to reflect

the environmental damage being done. And that needs to be supported by

cultural change, but I dispute the extent to which we can solve this by

people voluntarily changing their behaviour, giving money to the third

World or eating less meat. It requires the organised religions to

be part of this, in spreading a culture that is more eco-friendly.

Are you a fan of wind farms? Absolutely not. They squander

billions of pounds which could be used to do something useful on

inefficient sources of energy. We have this debate about how we should

prioritise cutting emissions. Britain building lots of offshore

wind farms will do nothing to help the major emitters who really count

as India and China dashed cut their emissions. It will only show them.

The Chinese are building coal power plants at a ferocious rate. These

economies run on fossil fuels. The only way we can help is by making

low carbon energy cheap, rather than using it when it is expensive.

friend Fiona once back in. Yes, making low carbon energy cheap is a

good idea, and renewables is a way to do that. At the moment, we have

fossil fuel reserves that are cheap and easy to get at, coal, oil and

gas. We have the technology to get at them. We can blast apart rocks in

the technology known as fracking that will release gas and oil. We

can do that now. We were not able to do it for years, but now we are

doing it all around the world. If we continue to take out the fossil

fuels to which we have access and if we burn them, Mark will be able to

tell you that we will get not just a world in which we have a bit of

global warming am a big two degrees or something like that, we will get

the world in which we have about six degrees of global warming. The world

at the moment is less than six degrees warmer than it was in the

last ice age. That is the kind of change. If you are prepared to have

that, dig it up. How do you leave that stuff in the ground? Because

you have to. Are you telling people they have to? Are you an imperialist

now? Are you going to conquer these countries and tell them not to do

it? China is spending more money now than the United States. Because they

are selling it to us. We are paying for it! They are spending on

alternative energy. You don't change overnight. I am concerned by the

degree to which China and India are being held up as these bogey people

who we have to constrain. Firstly, many of them have profound value

systems. And we are talking about value systems. Economics and

environmental movement are simply a manifestation of a fundamental

value. Most of our discussion is not at the values level, it is at the

implementation level. What I see happening in China and to some

degree in India is actually a rear exploration of some of their

traditional values in order to understand what is happening. If you

take the Daoist approach towards climate change and the burning of

fossil fuels, they understand that in the notion of Xeon and yang, Yoon

is the earth, Yang is the heaven. By burning what is in the earth and

putting it into the heaven, you are unbalancing the universe. That is a

common-sense philosophy. There is a huge change going on, and the

problem is that we come and talk about it into is of economic

incentives. What about the philosophical incentives? What do

you think about what you are hearing? There is enough for

everyone's need, but there was not enough for everyone's greed. Sophie

are responsible. If we take this oil and coal out all the time, we will

disturb the system. Some scientists say that earthquakes and tsunamis

are happening because we are taking everything out from the earth all

the time. We may well as did the system within an inch of its life.

We may disturb the system so that there are only a billion people who

can get a living and only a few elephants et, and the whole thing

starts again from that hammered plateau. Isn't that a problem?It is

a problem. World socialism trying to sort it out might be an even bigger

problem. What I mean by that... Could you put that on the record?

have just said it. What I mean is that if our adventure turns out to

produce quite a big wobble, that wobble will last a thousand years.

But for my money, it remains an extraordinary adventure, the human

one. And you can't do it by subtracting risk. We could see this

thing coming down the line at us like a train. It would be sensible

to get out of the way. We know we have crossed this threshold of 400

parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We know that if

we continue driving this upwards to the extent that we are, we are going

to heat the planet. We have satellites all around us but can

tell us the planet is absorbing more energy than it is giving out.

will happen to us? The worst-case scenario is that we would see a big

population reduction and the kind of planet treating which has not been

seen for 60 million years. Drought, famine, pestilence? But that is not

have to happen. It is unavoidable scenario. If there are billion

people left as a result of these kinds of changes, that means 8

billion people are going to go. That is an unimaginable catastrophe we

are talking about. That helped us focus on the idea that we are having

a false argument about people versus the environment. It is about

protecting the environment in order to ensure a decent future for all

human beings. Reverend Philip Foster, you believe ultimately that

God will protect us? Not quite that. God has given us this planet, that

was my first point. Will God looked after us? If we trust him, yes. But

if we don't, we will face the consequences of our mistakes. That

is the way it works. If you drive nature into a corner, it will bite

back. You do not believe the world will end at some time anyway? I do,

yes. Is this it? I doubt it. There will be a time for it to come to an

end. But you can't accelerate it. We are kind to create an environment

where we can all live happily and more sustainably and I don't think

they are mutually exclusive. We are all going to converge on solutions.

Are we going to convince people in the developing world that they

should not engage in fracking? Or is it more likely that we will develop

technological innovation that will solve these problems? Some models

say that if we stopped producing greenhouse gases tomorrow, it would

be a thousand years before the planet to down. So we have to

develop solutions for the mess we have got into. Anyone in the

audience? I have noticed that we are looking at all of these things as

isolated events, and I am not an expert mobot I think everything is

integrated, the growth in population and environment. If we look at the

causes of everything, at the moment, we have to look at where the most

money is going into. And that is war. Most of the money in the world

is going into the prophet of making war. And all these corporate

organisations are taking so much resources cost they don't have a

proper value system. If we try to educate people and change

institutions to change them relatively more than anyone who goes

into these businesses will be able to work together and create a

solution. I work for the church of England and

spend my time trying to convince congregations about the environment.

One of the big issues is not that people are unaware of what is

happening, it is where they make it a priority. We don't seem to be able

to get into a debate where people see in their daily lives that this

is a priority. We have very little time left, as people have said.

would agree. We need to see this as the biggest issue facing us today.

But there are so many issues within the issues. Yes, but if people out

there understood how big this problem was, anyone with children

would be thinking, unlike Richard, who seems to be living on a

different planet, would be thinking, what can I do about it? If everyone

started it supporting environmental groups and writing to their MP and

saying the natural balance of the planet is more important, that is

the way. Let's go back to where we started, with our fellow species.

Your parents, Bill Travis and Virginia McKenna, made these

marvellous films. That film, born free, after which your organisation

is made, was incredible. There are probably about 15,000 lions left in

Africa. It is one of those statistics that just hits you. A

beautiful, amazing animal. Just to be devil's advocate, if we lose

them, why does it matter? It is an interesting question. But there is

not so much a practical answer, it is more a philosophical and is. If

we are unable to find enough room in the world for wild species such as

lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, great apes etc, then nothing else is

safe. Nothing else is safe, because we are prepared to those species

go. There will be no other lines to draw in the sand. In other words, it

will eventually become all about us. It is already almost about us, but

it will become all about us to the exclusion of everything that does

not provide some kind of service to us alone. We have had at least 40

years of school teachers telling children how much the environment

matters, and the children soak it up and say they are to refit the green.

And they have grown up to be very bullying to their parents about

recycling nonsense, and then they jump in planes as fast as they can

get into them and go off for long holidays and trips abroad.

Notionally, they have had a couple of school generations of

indoctrination which they say they have totally internalised. Why I

think things may unfold pretty much as they are going to unfold is that

so far as I can see, you can pump all this attitude change into kids,

and they will love it, and they will still jump in the aeroplanes. They

do. Are we going to make it, as a species? Is our ticket booked for a

while yet? You have a minute. Theologically, there was a real

conundrum. I believe evolution is how God has worked out the planet

will evolve. I don't see that we are particularly Morse special than the

trilobites that were successful for about 140 million years. They died

out 120 million years ago. One of our problems is that we take

ourselves a bit too seriously. If we have not got space for the rest of

it, then probably, we will be dropped on the plot. Thank you all

very much for taking part. Thank you for your contributions. The debate