00:00:15.480 This is part one of Chapter 17 Unsustainable, which I presume will go for a few episodes.
00:00:22.160 It's one of those chapters that fits the description that I've heard other people say that
00:00:26.960 sentences in this book could be turned into entire paragraphs, paragraphs could be turned into chapters
00:00:33.360 and chapters could be turned into entire books. This certainly could be turned into an entire book,
00:00:38.800 this particular chapter. Unsustainable. Sustainability is a huge catch cry of the environmental movement
00:00:46.000 today. It is not only part of the environmental movement, it is now permeated the culture to such
00:00:52.240 an extent that sustainability is regarded as an important moral virtue that people hold. Things
00:00:59.680 need to be sustainable. We need to be able to sustain our existence, not only on this planet,
00:01:05.520 but in our own personal lives. Things have to be done in a sustainable way. So we're told,
00:01:11.760 this is going to challenge our understanding of what sustainability is, the different kinds of meanings
00:01:18.240 that people seem to intend when they use the word sustainable and sometimes these meanings happen
00:01:24.640 to be at odds with each other. We're going to talk about what's unsustainable and what really
00:01:30.480 is sustainable. And we're going to find that only one thing can really be sustainable if by what we
00:01:36.400 want from sustainability is survival, not only for ourselves, but for everything else that we
00:01:41.760 care about in the universe. Along the way, we're going to encounter the consequences of the static
00:01:47.920 society lifestyle, why we should want to be an open dynamic society. We're going to talk about
00:01:54.480 optimism again. We're going to bring back what we've already talked about from the book previously
00:01:59.600 and then use it in order to move forward into the infinite future. Along the way, we're going to
00:02:05.360 encounter Brunowski and Attenborough and compare these two great documentary makers in terms of
00:02:12.400 their underlying philosophy and what the key differences between them. We're going to see that we're
00:02:17.760 in a pessimistic era. Now to a large extent, this has always been so, but culturally at the
00:02:23.440 interface between science, science communication and entertainment, in other words, science documentaries,
00:02:29.520 we're going to see that there has been a recent decline in the kind of positivity, optimism,
00:02:37.040 and value of human flourishing that used to be part of the way in which we came to understand
00:02:44.960 our place in reality. Now, unfortunately, it seems as though we are the virus, we are the disease,
00:02:51.680 people are the problem that need to be solved rather than being the solution. We're going to get
00:02:56.880 to all of that. Let's just dive into the book. Chapter 17, unsustainable and David begins,
00:03:04.160 quote, Easter Island in the South Pacific is famous mainly. Let's face it only. For the large stone
00:03:11.520 statues that were built there many centuries ago by the Islanders. The purpose of the statues is
00:03:16.800 unknown, but it is thought to be connected with an ancestor worshipping religion. The first settlers
00:03:22.800 may have arrived on the Islanders early as the 5th century CE. They develop a complex stone age
00:03:28.560 civilization, which suddenly collapsed over a millennium later. By some accounts there was starvation,
00:03:34.640 war and perhaps cannibalism. The population fell to a small fraction of what it had been,
00:03:40.080 and their culture was lost. The prevailing theories that the Easter Islanders brought disaster
00:03:45.120 upon themselves, in part by chopping down the forest, which had originally covered most of the
00:03:49.920 island. They eliminated the most useful species of tree altogether. This is not a wise thing to do
00:03:55.040 if you rely on timber for shelter or a fish form a large part of your diet and your boats and
00:04:00.480 nets are made of wood. There were knock on effects such as soil erosion, precipitating the
00:04:05.600 destruction of the environment on which the Islanders had depended. Some archaeologists dispute this
00:04:11.040 theory. For example, Terry Hunt has concluded that the Islanders arrived only in the 13th century,
00:04:17.600 and that their civilization continued to function throughout the deforestation, which he
00:04:21.920 attributes to rats, not tree filling. Until it was destroyed by epidemics caused by contact with
00:04:27.760 Europeans. However, I do not want to discuss whether the prevailing theory is accurate, but only to
00:04:33.120 use it as an example of a common fallacy, an argument by analogy about issues far less parochial,
00:04:40.560 pausing there just my brief reflection. Immediately notice the key difference between a civilization
00:04:48.400 like the ancient civilization of Easter Island and our civilization today. It almost goes without
00:04:55.360 saying that sometimes these things, because you're swimming in the aquarium, so to speak, you don't
00:05:00.160 notice the water, we're swimming in this civilization. We don't notice the fact that we are not
00:05:06.080 dependent on the natural environment in the same way to the same extent as the Easter Islanders
00:05:13.760 were. There is a stark difference here. Sure, in one sense, we need natural resources just as
00:05:20.640 any other civilization ever has like the Easter Islanders. However, the Easter Islanders almost like
00:05:27.520 almost like animals, other animals, are completely subject to subtle changes in the natural
00:05:34.480 environment that they lacked the knowledge of how to counter, unlike us. If the wind starts to blow
00:05:43.040 too hard, if tonight there's a terrible thunderstorm which here in Sydney there's predicted to be,
00:05:48.400 I am relatively safe. The natural environment can change quite markedly outside of my house,
00:05:56.720 and I can barely notice. I've got climate control here. Nothing like the Easter Islanders had.
00:06:03.440 The Easter Islanders didn't have artificial fertilizer. They were completely subject to whatever
00:06:08.720 the natural environment provided them with. Their knowledge was not able to construct things
00:06:14.400 within their environment to protect them against the forces of nature, to the same extent that we can.
00:06:20.320 There is a huge quantitative difference in the amount of knowledge that our
00:06:26.400 civilization had. And of course, there's a qualitative difference in their approach to knowledge
00:06:31.280 as well as we're about to find out. Our approach to knowledge is this culture of criticism,
00:06:36.880 where we are continuously improving things as David's about to illustrate with the Easter
00:06:41.840 Islanders. There's was a civilization where they were singularly unable because of the
00:06:49.520 ideas that they had of improving their situation in time before the civilization went extinct
00:06:56.880 killing all of them. So we are, yes, dependent upon the environment for some natural resources.
00:07:05.120 However, our relationship to those natural resources is such that if they begin to reduce
00:07:11.360 to the point where we begin to run out of a particular resource, we can create the knowledge
00:07:18.000 of how to exploit a different resource such that we can continue to survive an environment
00:07:24.080 which is continuously running out of resources. This is unlike the Easter Islanders where if a
00:07:30.560 finite resource begins to run out, then they have no means of replacing that particular resource.
00:07:38.160 We, on the other hand, a classic example, if we begin to run out of wood for burning,
00:07:46.320 we can turn to coal in order to keep ourselves warm. And in the extreme, if we ran out of coal
00:07:51.760 tomorrow, we could turn to uranium. And then we could turn to solar power and batteries. And you
00:07:58.080 might well wonder if we continue to tell this story of our civilization gradually running out
00:08:04.320 of the resources that we have, we can still imagine a scenario where we create knowledge
00:08:10.320 not yet created, which would bring into being another resource so that we can continue to survive.
00:08:17.200 Because if things get desperate enough, our culture of criticism will turn its gaze towards that
00:08:22.400 problem and attempt to solve it in time. This wasn't even happening in Easter Island, as we
00:08:28.400 will come to see, but back to the book. David writes, Easter Island is 2000 kilometers from the
00:08:34.800 nearest habitation, namely Pitcan Island where the bounties crew took refuge after their famous
00:08:40.160 mutiny. Okay, better, better just to unpack that little bit there for, especially readers I
00:08:47.120 presume who might be outside of the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand, namely if you're in
00:08:54.320 the United States, perhaps. I don't know how famous the bounty story is, unless you happen to
00:09:00.560 have seen the movie or one of the many movies. There's been five movies made of this single event
00:09:06.400 up to today's date. And also Pitcan Island, you can watch all sorts of amazing documentaries
00:09:12.400 about Pitcan Island. It's a fascinating place because, while the mutiny is from the bounty,
00:09:18.080 led by Fletcher Christian, eventually ended up on Pitcan Island, and their descendants
00:09:23.680 live there through to today. And although they speak English, they have a slightly different accent
00:09:29.440 to other people. They have a strange system of governance. They have this little civilization
00:09:35.840 eking out, a living on this tiny little island very far from anywhere. In fact, there are now that
00:09:42.000 some of the, you can tune in on YouTube, you can tune in to some of the young inhabitants who have
00:09:47.600 YouTube channels and they do live streaming from Pitcan Island because it's just a fascinating place.
00:09:52.880 It's so far from anywhere else that's civilized, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. And so Fletcher
00:09:59.680 Christians descendants are still there. And who did Fletcher Christian mutiny against Captain
00:10:06.240 Bligh? Or at that time, Lieutenant Bligh. And he's well known in Australia. He's well known in Australia
00:10:11.840 because he was one of the first naval officers sent by, sent by the British who were sending their
00:10:20.640 convicts as many Americans will know. We began as a convict nation. They sent over all of their
00:10:25.600 prisoners to New South Wales. What was then New South Wales, the entirety of mainland Australia was
00:10:31.520 known as New South Wales at that time. It wasn't until later, until the 1900s, that all of the
00:10:36.720 states, which were colonies at that time, were then divided up into the states and then federated
00:10:42.800 into what is now known as Australia. Anyway, that's beside the point. Captain Bligh was sent by the
00:10:51.200 British to be one of the first governors of New South Wales and funnily enough, it wouldn't have
00:10:58.400 been funny for him. This is after the mutiny on the bounty, so after he had been thrown off his
00:11:06.000 rather large naval ship into a small life raft, basically a small life boat, little sailing boat,
00:11:12.320 and barely survived to make it all the way home. It's an interesting story to look up, as I say,
00:11:18.960 there's been lots of movies made about it. But when he did get sent back to Australia, I guess,
00:11:24.800 as a reward, he was tasked with trying to clean up what was known as the the rum problem. There was
00:11:36.000 an illicit trading of the alcohol rum amongst the guards, amongst the navy sailors, officers,
00:11:45.280 marines that were stationed here in New South Wales in order to keep control of the convicts and
00:11:51.600 keep law and order. So they started becoming drunkards. Anyway, Bligh was tasked with cleaning this up
00:11:58.880 and he failed. He was once again mutinied. He was imprisoned by his own officers and soldiers and
00:12:07.120 various others. So he didn't have a whole lot of luck. Now, this is all after, by the way, after,
00:12:14.640 he had a company, Captain James Cook, who is even more famous than Captain Bligh here in
00:12:22.000 Australia. Captain Cook was the first Englishman to make it to the eastern coast of Australia to
00:12:29.120 discover, you know, the first white person to come to Australia in 1770. So he is our, he's our
00:12:35.760 Christopher Columbus, if you're watching this from America. Captain James Cook is our Christopher Columbus
00:12:40.880 discovered in scare quotes Australia. He, he was with Captain Bligh on his final voyage to Hawaii
00:12:52.480 where he was killed by the locals. So Captain Bligh, a company to cook on his final voyage got
00:12:58.160 killed, then when he was finally giving command of his own boat, namely the bounty, they all
00:13:04.000 mutinied against him and threw him off and he barely survived that. He was then sent to Australia
00:13:09.520 where Captain Cook had actually discovered the blaze and the locals then that he was supposed to be
00:13:15.120 in charge. I'm supposed to be the governor over mutinied against him once more and he ended up going
00:13:20.400 back to England after that. He didn't seem to have a great stellar career, although if you look
00:13:27.040 into Captain Bligh's story, there are many sympathetic readings of the history of Captain Bligh.
00:13:33.120 And some of those movies out of those five movies, I think I've seen three of them,
00:13:36.480 some are more sympathetic than others when it comes to Captain Bligh. Whether or not he was a
00:13:42.000 kind of a nice guy and a good leader or a terrible tyrant, history is still trying to decide.
00:13:48.960 So yeah, that's just a diverse on Australia because Ken Island has been mentioned here and the bounty.
00:13:56.720 Okay, let's keep going. Both islands, namely, Pete Ken Island and Easter Island, David writes,
00:14:03.760 are far from anywhere, even by today's standards. Nevertheless, in 1972, Jacob Bernowski made
00:14:11.120 his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent TV series The Acentive Man. Now just
00:14:17.120 pausing there again. Jacob Bernowski, you may recall his name, various people have referred to him
00:14:25.360 over time for his great essay about science and values and David references that you may remember,
00:14:32.240 all the way back in the reality of abstractions. So I just want to remind listeners, viewers of
00:14:41.120 the genius of Jacob Bernowski, who David quoted all the way back down the reality of abstractions,
00:14:47.440 where David said, for example, as philosopher Jacob Bernowski pointed out, success at making
00:14:54.640 factual scientific discoveries entails a commitment to all sorts of values that are necessary
00:15:00.400 for making progress. The individual scientist has to value truth and good explanations and has to be
00:15:06.320 open to ideas and to change the scientific community and to some extent the civilization as a whole
00:15:11.760 has to value tolerance, integrity and openness of debate. Okay, so that's what David wrote about
00:15:18.560 Jacob Bernowski back in the reality of abstractions. Here are your peers again as a documentary
00:15:25.760 maker. And I think if you read the moral landscape or other things that Sam Harris has said on
00:15:33.920 this topic, he also references Jacob Bernowski in a similar way talking about how Bernowski referred
00:15:41.760 to a scientist as needing to respect evidence to value logic. So we need these moral values,
00:15:51.520 these moral values are in a sense prior to the activity of science. If you try to do science,
00:15:59.040 perform an experiment, create an explanation without caring about coherence, evidence,
00:16:07.600 truth, then what's the point? Okay, you need to first have a commitment to these values.
00:16:13.600 So it's not like morality can be divorced at all from the activity of science. There are things
00:16:19.920 that you that one should do, one should have these values before one can in fact find out what is
00:16:27.360 the case in science. Back to the book, David writes. He, Jacob Bernowski and his film crew traveled
00:16:33.840 by ship all the way from California around trip of some 14,000 kilometers. He was in poor health
00:16:40.560 and the crew had literally to carry him to the location for filming, but he persevered because
00:16:46.400 those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his
00:16:51.520 series, which is also a theme of this book that our civilization is unique in history for its
00:16:57.360 capacity to make progress. He wanted to celebrate its values and achievements and to attribute
00:17:03.200 the latter to the former. So he wanted to celebrate its values and achievements and attribute the
00:17:09.040 latter, the achievements. He wanted to attribute all the achievements of civilization,
00:17:13.600 our civilization, Western civilization, science and great art, politics, stable societies
00:17:20.640 to its values, its values of human dignity and the inherent sacredness of life and our commitment
00:17:28.800 to truth, those sort of values. David goes on and to contrast our civilization with the alternative
00:17:35.440 as epitomized by ancient Easter Island. The ascent of man had been commissioned by the naturalist
00:17:42.080 David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel, BBC2. A quarter of a century
00:17:48.480 later, Attenborough, who had by then become the Doyon of natural history filmmaking,
00:17:54.000 led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series, The State of the Planet.
00:18:00.560 He too chose those grim face statues as a backdrop for his closing scene, alas,
00:18:05.760 his message was almost exactly the opposite of Brunowski's. The philosophical difference between
00:18:12.560 these two great broadcasters so alike in their infectious sense of wonder, the clarity of exposition
00:18:19.440 and their humanity was immediately evident in their different attitudes towards those statues.
00:18:24.640 Attenborough called them astonishing stone sculptures, vivid evidence of the technological
00:18:30.320 and artistic skills of the people who once lived here. Now I wonder whether Attenborough was really
00:18:36.720 all that impressed by the islander's skills, which had been exceeded millennia earlier
00:18:41.760 in other Stone Age societies. I expect he was being polite, for his day regurg and our culture
00:18:47.680 to heat praise upon any achievement of a primitive society. But Brunowski refused to conform to
00:18:54.560 that convention. He remarked, people often ask about Easter Island, how did men come here?
00:19:01.600 They came here by accident, that is not in question. The question is, why could they not get off?
00:19:07.120 And why, he might have added, did others not follow to trade with them? There was a great deal
00:19:12.880 of trade among Polynesians other than Easter Islanders, or to rob them, or to learn from them,
00:19:18.560 because they did not know how. As for the statues being, vivid evidence of artistic skills,
00:19:27.440 Brunowski was having none of that either. To him, they were vivid evidence of failure, not success.
00:19:35.360 Men David quotes Brunowski, and Brunowski said, quote,
00:19:39.600 The critical question about these statues is, why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there
00:19:46.400 like diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye sockets, and watching the sun
00:19:52.720 and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this
00:19:58.640 island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise,
00:20:06.320 but it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, these frozen faces,
00:20:13.280 these frozen frames in a film that is running down market civilization, which failed to take the first
00:20:20.000 step on the ascent of rational knowledge, end quote from the ascent of man in 1973.
00:20:28.560 The statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society. It never took
00:20:33.680 that first step in the ascent of man, the beginning of infinity. Of the hundreds of statues on the
00:20:39.360 island built over the course of several centuries, fewer than half are at their intended destinations.
00:20:44.960 The rest, including the largest, are in various stages of completion, with as many as 10%
00:20:49.840 already in transit on specially built roads. Again, there are conflicting explanations, but according
00:20:55.120 to the prevailing theory, it is because there was a large increase in the rate of statue building
00:21:00.480 just before it stopped forever. In other words, as disaster loomed, the islanders diverted
00:21:06.800 ever more effort to not addressing the problem for they did not know how to do that, but into making
00:21:13.520 ever more and bigger, but very rarely better, monuments to their ancestors. And what were those roads
00:21:20.240 made of? Trees. When Brunowski made his documentary, there were as yet no detailed theories
00:21:27.680 of how the Easter Island civilization fell, but unlike Edinburgh, he was not interested in that because
00:21:33.680 his whole purpose in going to Easter Island was to point out the profound difference between
00:21:38.000 our civilization and civilizations like the one that built those statues. We are not like them
00:21:44.720 was his message. We have taken the step that they did not. Edinburgh's argument rests on the opposite
00:21:50.400 claim. We are like them, and are following headlong in their footsteps. And so he drew and extended
00:21:56.160 analogy between the Easter Island civilization and hours, feature for feature, and danger for danger.
00:22:02.240 An Attenborough said, quote, a warning of what the future could hold can be seen on one of the
00:22:08.560 most remotest places on earth. When the first Polynesian settlers landed here, they found a miniature
00:22:14.480 world that had ample resources to sustain them. They lived well, end quote, from the state of
00:22:20.560 the planet, BBC TV in the year 2000. David continues, a miniature world there in three words,
00:22:28.320 his Attenborough's reason for traveling all the way to Easter Island and telling it story.
00:22:33.600 He believed that it holds a warning for the world because Easter Island was itself a miniature world,
00:22:39.440 a spaceship earth that went wrong. It had ample resources to sustain its population. Just as the
00:22:45.440 earth has seemingly ample resources to sustain us. Imagine how amazed Malthus would have been,
00:22:52.000 had he known that the earth's resources would still be called ample by pessimists in the year
00:22:57.680 2000. Its inhabitants lived well, just as we do, and yet they were doomed, just as we are doomed,
00:23:04.480 unless we change our ways. If we do not, here is what the future could hold, and David quotes
00:23:10.480 Attenborough again. The old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled,
00:23:16.480 what had been a rich fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert, end quote,
00:23:21.280 David writes. Again, Attenborough puts in a good word for the old culture. It sustained the islanders,
00:23:28.160 just as the ample resources did, until the islanders failed to use them sustainably. He uses
00:23:33.600 the toppling of the statues to symbolise the fall of that culture as if to warn a future disaster
00:23:39.040 for hours. And he reiterates his world in miniature analogy between the society and technology
00:23:45.680 of ancient Easter Island, and that of our whole planet today. Thus, Attenborough's Easter Island is
00:23:52.160 a variant of spaceship earth. Humans are sustained jointly by the rich fertile biosphere and
00:23:58.240 the cultural knowledge of a static society. In this context, sustain is an interestingly ambiguous
00:24:04.640 word. It can mean providing someone with what they need, but it can also mean preventing things
00:24:11.680 from changing, which can be almost the opposite meaning. For the suppression of change is seldom
00:24:17.920 what human beings need, pause their my reflection. So before we go much further into this,
00:24:24.400 we have to observe that this entire vision that Attenborough paints for us has permeated the culture
00:24:32.880 so deeply. Attenborough is rightly known as one of the greatest documentary makers of all time.
00:24:39.840 Young people especially love him. They love his voice, they love his infectious sense of wonder
00:24:46.480 about the world as David talked about there. And the cinematography of a lot of his documentaries
00:24:52.320 is absolutely astounding. You get to see places that you would otherwise never get to encounter.
00:24:58.080 He was able to bring that into your living room, into your life, and so people tend to fall in love
00:25:03.760 with that style. And sadly, they also fall in love to a large extent with the message. And the
00:25:09.760 message now is not only part of documentary making, it's a deep part of the worldview
00:25:17.840 held by especially scientists and science-minded people. As much as anyone else, there would be
00:25:26.560 few competitors that could rise to the heights of Attenborough who have pushed forward this movement
00:25:34.480 of thinking that we are just like the Easter Islanders. We are at a point where the Easter
00:25:41.200 Islanders were just prior to their demise. We are consuming the limited resources on the earth
00:25:47.520 and everything is about to fall apart any minute. We are in dire straits, the catastrophe is looming.
00:25:53.520 This is the same old Malthusian argument. Perhaps they don't need the graphs that Malthus used,
00:26:01.040 they just appeal to your emotions and to your supposed common sense that clearly resources
00:26:09.200 on the planet must be limited because the planet is of finite size. This is incomplete and utter
00:26:16.720 contrast to everything that we have talked about throughout this series and that David has
00:26:21.360 talked about in the beginning of infinity and of course is the complete opposite to what
00:26:26.240 Bernowski tried to convey in the ascent of man. The difference here could not be more stark.
00:26:33.440 On the one hand we have this vision of resources that are finite and people who deplete them
00:26:40.160 and will only ever deplete them. And on the other people who are able to discover resources
00:26:46.320 and create knowledge which causes things that otherwise wouldn't be resources to be resources
00:26:52.720 and to ensure that those resources never run out because resources as a whole are effectively
00:26:59.040 unlimited because the universe is effectively unlimited. You can see my recent podcast Cosmological
00:27:05.360 Economics for more on that. This is a very interesting distinction that David makes here about
00:27:11.520 the word sustain and it's worth just meditating on this for a moment. On the one hand,
00:27:17.840 sustain can mean providing people with what they need. Now what do people need? Well people don't
00:27:25.280 just need the same thing again and again and again. They need to experience change, development,
00:27:34.080 growth, knowledge creation and that to fuel that in their personal lives and at the level of
00:27:41.360 a civilization requires energy, resources and so we can't possibly be in a situation where
00:27:51.200 sustain can mean preventing things from changing which is also a meaning of sustain that people use
00:27:56.720 but we can't sustain in such a way that things don't change. It must be the case that we have to
00:28:01.920 change, not least because the problems of tomorrow are completely unknown to us today. We don't
00:28:08.800 know what's going to happen tomorrow. The environment itself is going to change. As I like to keep
00:28:14.320 saying, the cosmological event is out there one day. Something is going to happen. Out of the clear
00:28:20.960 blue sky that is completely going to upset us on a lazy Tuesday afternoon and we will be unprepared
00:28:27.600 for it if we do not create the knowledge because regardless of what we do, the natural environment
00:28:33.520 is going to change. Now either we can react to it in the moment or we can be the kind of people
00:28:40.800 who prepare for the unknown. We can't simply try to pretend that problems are not going to happen
00:28:48.560 because we know that they are inevitable. As David says in many many places, at many times throughout
00:28:54.400 the book and in these TED talks and elsewhere, we need to have a stance of problem solving.
00:29:00.480 If we think we can avoid problems, we're going to be sorely disappointed. We cannot predict what
00:29:05.760 is going to happen tomorrow. We don't know about all of the unknowns that are out there that could
00:29:12.240 cause us problems. Whether from the blue sky or the blue sea, something is going to happen for which
00:29:19.680 we are unprepared and the only thing that can ensure or can help ensure that we do not go the
00:29:27.120 way of the dinosaur is to use the one thing that makes us different, our capacity to create knowledge
00:29:34.160 and to form models of the rest of physical reality. To do that, we need fuel, we need resources,
00:29:39.920 we need to keep on changing rapidly. We need to make rapid progress. Another way of saying
00:29:45.680 we need change is just to say we need good kinds of change, improvement, progress. All of this requires
00:29:52.240 fuel. We can't get this from nothing. We can't just create knowledge without exploiting the world
00:29:58.720 around us and shaping the world around us so that it protects us and nurtures us to some extent
00:30:04.320 from the otherwise hostile universe and continuing David Wright. The knowledge that currently
00:30:11.120 sustains human life in Oxfordshire does so only in the first sense. It does not make us enact the
00:30:18.320 same traditional way of life in every generation. In fact, it prevents us from doing so. For comparison,
00:30:23.760 if your way of life merely makes you build a new giant statue, you can continue to live afterwards
00:30:29.040 exactly as you did before. That is sustainable. But if your way of life leads you to invent a
00:30:33.760 more efficient method of farming and to cure a disease that has been killing many children,
00:30:38.720 that is unsustainable. The population grows because children who would have died survive. Meanwhile,
00:30:46.080 fewer of them are needed to work in the fields and so there is no way to continue as before.
00:30:51.440 You have to live the solution and to set about solving new problems that this creates.
00:30:56.400 It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain,
00:31:00.240 with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization
00:31:05.680 with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had it at Zenith
00:31:10.080 and an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has
00:31:15.040 knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain
00:31:21.440 pause there and I'll end the reading there as well. It's a little short episode but it's a
00:31:26.560 nice neat way to end it here because we go into static cultures more deeply here. We take a deep dive
00:31:33.760 into static cultures. We'll do that in the next episode but again David mentions his home there
00:31:39.520 in Oxfordshire and has made the point previously that although you might think that for example
00:31:46.000 you know when Attenborough goes to Easter Island he thinks well this place is sustaining,
00:31:51.200 sustaining the people that are there, the Easter Islanders were sustained until they did something
00:31:55.680 wrong and they were no longer sustained by the natural environment. We only have to consider
00:31:59.600 somewhere like Oxfordshire in the winter where it is completely inhospitable and you wouldn't
00:32:07.120 survive very long at all unless you had the technology of a modern civilization. Certainly anyone
00:32:14.160 who lives there now who doesn't have the technology provided by modern civilization in terms of
00:32:22.080 insulation in the walls and perhaps electric heating systems and ways in which to bring food and
00:32:30.080 water which isn't frozen in pipes and so on. The natural environment there is not sustaining
00:32:37.520 people at all. What's sustaining people there now in the sense that Attenborough is talking about
00:32:43.360 the way in which people can survive to some extent. In fact that's probably all they were doing
00:32:49.200 on Easter Island is just barely eeking out as a viable but at least in Oxfordshire today not only
00:32:53.680 are we surviving people surviving they're also thriving they're flourishing they're creating an
00:32:59.440 open-ended stream of knowledge creation but they're only doing that they're only able to do that
00:33:05.200 because they are sustained in this sense by the knowledge they've already created and the
00:33:10.160 technology they already have it's certainly not the natural environment. The natural environment
00:33:14.480 contributes something but it's but it's also it's as much as it's contributing resources and
00:33:23.520 oxygen and water it's also contributing freezing cold temperatures not enough food in the natural
00:33:32.320 environment for people to survive water that isn't clean enough to drink or to make tea with so
00:33:39.120 there's there's very little sense in which the natural environment of Oxfordshire is sustaining people
00:33:44.240 and I might say the same about even Australia which is somewhat more temperate most of the time
00:33:49.040 if I was left alone for a month here in Australia with no access to technology whatsoever on modern
00:33:55.200 civilization I'd be very quickly dead. In fact I'd probably only last a few days because
00:34:00.560 the natural water that happens to exist around here probably would kill me and certainly if I
00:34:06.000 went to the centre of Australia it's definitely not going to sustain me I'd have no clue about how
00:34:09.760 to get water out of the deserts and much less be able to capture any food or eat any food
00:34:15.840 most of the stuff out there is poisonous so I am only sustained not by the natural environment
00:34:21.280 at all but rather by civilization the civilization that is around me that's the thing that is
00:34:28.560 sort of nurturing me and able to help me to survive and that's true of anyone who lives in
00:34:34.000 civilization today we are beating back the natural environment which is rather hostile we've
00:34:42.320 eaked out a resistant we've eaked out our existence so far so this is the great positive vision
00:34:48.560 that we have of the the the the of civilization we do not regard the natural environment has
00:34:58.000 been this cuddly thing that sustains us rather it is just a source of natural resources
00:35:05.920 which if we didn't exploit by creating knowledge about how to use these natural resources
00:35:12.080 and new and interesting ways would quickly kill us because we we we need knowledge of how to
00:35:20.080 survive in these environments and absent civilization almost none of us would have the knowledge
00:35:26.160 of what it takes to survive in a natural environment so it's not that's not what sustaining it's
00:35:32.480 our it's our civilization coupled with our own personal explanatory knowledge to a large
00:35:38.640 extent about how to use the the benefits of civilization which is exploiting the natural environment
00:35:45.440 okay that's where we'll end it for today somewhat shorter episode but we will continue more with
00:35:53.040 this because it it deserves unsustainable chapter 17 deserves special attention I think because
00:35:59.600 here we are really we are really deeply coming up against the culture cultural means in many many
00:36:08.480 ways we're talking about how wonderful a Western civilization is but at the same time we're saying
00:36:14.320 all the ways in which presently via the television entertainment media the intellectual community
00:36:24.720 all the ways in which these aspects of Western civilization are actually telling us Western culture
00:36:28.640 anyway are sending us the message that we're the problem and so this is what David is trying to
00:36:35.760 counter here in this part of the beginning infinity and it's an extremely optimistic way of looking