welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website for our program good evening i'm avon stapp and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations tonight the topic is environmental and climate crisis of planet earth focusing especially on the impact of big agriculture and here to explain the crisis and the strategy for addressing it by means of restorative development is dr william umaga one of the most outstanding and scientist activists on the planet now retired but still very active dr moema was a professor of international environmental policy at the fletcher school of law and diplomacy at tufts university he was also the founding director there of the center for international environment and resources policy known as syrup and the toughs climate initiative and co founder of the global development and environment institute dr moema was lead author on numerous reports for the united nations intergovernmental panel on climate change known as the i p c c and was a member of the two thousand and seven i p c c panel that received the nobel peace prize which recognized al gore throughout his distinguished career dr more modern has been an innovator on multiple fronts in training students in research on environmental damage such as the distinguished awards and honors his students colleagues and the general public have all been the beneficiaries of his brilliance and commitment we are truly honored to welcome william will ma welcome sir thank you very public does not get much information about so we are very grateful to be able to pick your brain very much experience this so would you give us some background about what big agriculture does to the state of the earth well obviously agriculture was was invented it was invented and it was actually invented about ten thousand years ago that was the first green revolution and the purpose of it is to feed this expanding population which could go by another thirty forty percent by by twenty fifty someone said they're going to be a couple of two three billion more guests at the production methods and the reason for that is at the end of every growing season the soil is less capable of growing next year's crop because we have drained it of its  minerals and we have destroyed some of the carbon that is there some of that carbon ends up being eroded away goes into streams and eventually ends up in the ocean and some of it actually believe it or not gets converted into carbon dioxide goes directly into the atmosphere and every time we turn over some turn over soil with a plow we expose it to oxygen in the air that converts those nitrogen compounds into certain chemicals and converts the carbon in the soil into carbon dioxide so we're in a situation though where because we are also putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuels that combine with the carbon dioxide from soil and from deforestation is trapping heat and heating up the planet that's creating things like droughts like we've seen in california in the west  in the last four or five years that's also decreasing productivity we can now document that you know rice production which feeds whatever it is two billion people in the world is a product if productivity is down because of global warming it's the earth is warmer and it's it decreases the productivity of the crop of corn what we call corn and the europeans call maize is very temperature sensitive and is not the average temperature that is important is the peak temperature and we are seeing more high temperature records every year every month every month every month let me correct myself there and if you get the very high temperatures at the time that corn tassels that the tassel comes out you can decrease productivity by by quite a few percentage points so this is the d problem we have between needing more food and and yet decreasing our capacity to do so the way in which we've dealt with declining fertility by which we mean nutrients like nitrogen phosphorus and potassium but i'll focus mostly just on nitrogen too as it gets too complicated to cover it all is is to add more nitrogen to the soils and we can do that in two ways one is from animal manures and the other is from synthetic fertilizers and one of the great inventions after we figured out how to take  inert nitrogen out of the atmosphere and turn it into reactive chemicals just the way certain bacteria do in the soils was actually part of the war effort in germany in world war one  t because many explosives are made with and and in fact the many of the terrorist bombs and things are made with fertilizer because it contains the just something just it's explosive that's right that's in water one of the ironies is that we put a lot of fertilizer on to grow corn but something happens out half of that fertilizer never sees a corn plant it is washed away and goes down the river in the great midwest or in the san joaquin valley in california from which we get something huge fraction thirty forty whatever it is percent of our fruits and vegetables  are four hundred s two areas that are dead zones now because of the nitrogen that's gone there so here we are trying to grow corn mostly to feed livestock for protein and we are wiping out the protein production of the ocean in fish all right so that's more carbon in the soil it evaporates less so we've been depleting that pretty rapidly over the last hundred years and so again we've just been degrading the capacity of soils and i'll come back later to talk about how we might restore that can i guess the get further clarification for because i think that we in the public get minimal if any information we hear about the c o two in the environment i mean that in the atmosphere but a lot of people are not aware that there's nitrogen in the atmosphere that they're the jordie of our atmosphere but that's different from the chemical cycle  doing is as and what we've done is we now have added about twice the normal active nitrogen that's in the in the in the whole planetary nitrogen cycle so we've  and other things that are in fertilizer and and we have done this to the point that we now exceed what are called the planetary boundaries for nitrogen there are studies that have been done oh i think starting in two thousand and five looking at climate and nitrogen and phosphorus and what with fresh water and all these different things and nitrogen is one of the boundaries that has been exceeded and when we started studying the san joaquin valley in california we discovered that they amount of nitrogen there very irritating to the lungs in the bronx zoo and it reacts with ammonia that is released from animals manure and so forth to form particulates wh are lethal if you inhale these big particulars they're just the right size to damage your lungs and it contributes to the death rate so we are literally killing ourselves while we're feeding earlier study on the chesapeake bay area and there are problems there too but that's kind of wide open territory so you don't get the long residence times and the high concentrations that you get in the san it's and that river then is full of the runoff of the nitrate from the fertilizer and it contributes about twenty five percent of the total nitrogen going into the san francisco bay so it has multiple multiple effects it gets into the groundwater there that's one of the big sinks for it there it goes into the groundwater and it's so bad that the number of requests for financial aid there for a very long time and it just builds up in concentration ok and we have it in the atmosphere we have it into the ground and get water in different different chemical forms of reach has an impact and so one of our contributions  as to say well how do you compare the influence of reactive nitrogen forms in the in the water with those in the air and so we said ok you do it by tons and in california in the sampling doll you discover that there's something like three times as much nitrogen by tons in the water is there is in the air but if you do it in terms of the damage costs because of the health effects  the damage costs are double in the air or double those in the water so we said we need multiple metrics we had measure it in several different ways so we could do it strictly in terms of health effects we could do it in terms of serious problem as i said you know all the way from dead zones at the miles of rivers around the world to damage but by the way well water that has nitrate in it there are bacteria that converted into a different form called ni trite which is responsible for something called blue baby syndrome as nitrate grabs onto our hemoglobin much more strongly than oxygen and so it blocks it from getting enough oxygen and so babies in particular are very susceptible to fact something so they have a fair number of cases out there they have more more or than you'd have a elsewhere i soon i see in the sunlight keen which is a really great example of big yeah the other thing is that of a well i don't know what kinds of regulations you've pointed out multiple places you need regulations to control this kind of stuff to take care of it and to to regulate how it's getting in the system but these kinds of farmers lose their gag are generally not in favor of regulations period they want to get the government out of their hair and at the same time they depend i believe on massive subsidies from the taxpayer for big business in this case and that is a problem by itself does that contribute to the difficulty of getting this problem under control oh certainly and because you know i've had a conversation actually with the head of the the international fertilizer agency or w go organization in europe and he was very interesting fellow it and i was explaining this problem to him and i said to you so we you know we don't really think about the fertilizer beyond the edge of the field you know we just we just think of selling the and i said yes and furthermore if farmers think that if they just have a little bit more fertilizer they'll get a better crop and in many cases in the us they're putting it's not cost effective what they do they're putting on more than they get returned i say you know they've they've exceeded we could sell fertilization services rather than fertiliser meaning a farmer would come to us and we would through satellite measurements and everything else tell me exactly where he needs the fertilizer  exactly which moment or we ourselves would have companies that would come and put it on and you know you think about this some farmers just dump all the fertile that are in the spring will want to corn plant is that high doesn't need much fertilizer and  think but at the end of its growth spirit when it's when it's eight feet tall it doesn't need all of it and and so a lot of it gets washed away in between and so he said we could we could actually do that you know that's an interesting idea maybe we should still fertiliser services instead of fertilizer because we would then want to put the least amount fertilizer on as possible because that would be the most cost effective thing for us to do we could make the biggest profit that way but that's not the this certainly isn't at this time but the other is that it doesn't seem to be reversible once you've done this much damage i'm not clear like when you have done this much damage year after that yes there are ok well whoever is going out and buying up land and it's not only in the in the united states from the united states i think china a lot of countries are grabbing land all over the developing world particularly in africa yes and that is shoving poor people off of what land they have and they're doing this kind of damage  is it doing damage what do we know about well that it's interesting because it is you know africa is night is a is a place where it is a very nitrogen poor soil they could actually use a little additional nitrogen from they cannot feed and as it were instead of just doing trade they decided to actually own or lease land in the countries and some of these deals there's just very opaque as to who benefits and so forth but the united states and europe are responsible for a lot of this is well either directly or indirectly and mostly for growing biofuels  as in cancer where they grow it wherever they write so that's that's a problem that we have helped to create a saudi arabia saudi arabia used to grow wheat amazingly enough because they found a big underground storage store of water called an aqua for that aqua for has been completely used up i and they have had to shut down their wheat well then where are we going to grow our wheat to hank our bread well we will have to go someplace else and they are going to africa and they're buying there so there are mixed reasons why both way why both developed and developing countries are raiding african land and they've now there's an area i've heard various estimates of of the size of virginia or pennsylvania or something that has been taken over and that displaces people with subsistence agriculture sure exactly are there environmental  more nitrogen and they're adding it in ways that is over over fertilizing in many cases they're spraying pesticides there are all the things that go on in our industrial agriculture are being transferred to old set of issues right now right and certainly doesn't hit the media tomorrow it doesn't it doesn't and and it's it's this is it all comes under trade and of course trade is a wonderful thing in that you have to have more of it yes it's full of these protections as well exactly that before we get to your restore tive development idea because we want to spend a chunk of time on that i'd need to ask you what you think of the future of agricultural industrial agriculture this came up pretty much i guess that really maybe even before world war two but it's taken off as the here it is the solution to everything but it has caused so much environmental damage in a down day what do you think is the do we have to do something about the way we farm them with this burgeoning population is there a way to do it without this good question it's the other thing i haven't mentioned is that  industrial agriculture is very energy it into yeah it's you know the tractors the harvesters the it takes a huge amount of energy to make nice reason it pays is because the cost of energy has been low fossil fuel energy costs have been low and the gain the return has been high in terms of producing more  crops for acres some people have estimated that the nitrogen alone has doubled agricultural production just having that that fertilizer there even if it's not only used what does get used produces twice as much food as we would do without it and so people say well half the half the world's pop that population wouldn't be fed if it weren't for nitrogen fertilizer  hear this theme a lot as i write is that the thing is in the long run yes if you do this much damage to the soil and you can't come back right and you do this ation and all of this is the damage is enormous and the water table and so on then does it pay off well at sea that's an interesting question and and people are just beginning to face that as because we are hitting these planetary limits yes and then just one other thing on the energy energy intensity if you if you look average over the united states for every calorie of food you get it to eat fuels in terms of energy and another part of that is the polluting aspect yes from the nitrogen in the c o two both long range this if you don't just pull this nitrogen out of the atmosphere of th temperatures can be more than ten or twelve to very griese fahrenheit warmer which means the evaporation rate is so great that agricultural productivity goes down it sounds like  living it does trees are water pumps they take water from the ground and to get bring the nutrients to the leaves they evaporate the water from the leaves and so they're putting water vapor into the air so the whole precipitation system depends upon there being trees around and they've been cutting them down i mean i mean in all of these tropical right and and by the way united states actually has the highest important point that you need the four s not just some grass here and there it's bush's you need the for us to really doing this so it's not clear if they're going to clear all the land first of all to for agriculture and then do industrial agriculture which is so full of damage that can't seem to be rectified that's the problem i don't know what's interesting is you know so so what is the fastest growing sector of agriculture the united states today could the peace the way it's organic agriculture is growing oh wonderful it's like an alternative energy alternative energy right now the the current agricultural experts who are committed to the industrial form so you could never feed the world guess without this without this but that doesn't take into account the possibility of wasteful that if you've ever flown across the united states you know you see you look down you see these green circles as you go across the part of the country those are not alien landing that's not my we've thought all the time all the time trouble right now for that's right exactly but do you think that well maybe it's part of the restored development that that is certainly out the public is loves this idea of the organic thing and maybe we should if if we could make ours restore carbon into our soils which we can do and in fact there is an initiative put forth by the french government called four per thousand which stands for four parts of adding four parts of the per thousand every thousand pounds of soil we add four pounds of carbon from the atmosphere by sea by by planting plants agricultural practices grazing practices you know probably two thirds of all the grasslands the world of degraded and there are management techniques for restoring carbon to those soils and there are techniques for restoring carbon to the row crop kind of agricultural soils we would actually increase productivity without the other things there are actual experiments out there now covering  tens of millions of of acres in the world in the united states in australia in africa in now in china where grazing lands have been restored so that they produce four times as much livestock on the same size piece of land than you could if you just let them cows and sheep and goats go out there and eat everything but what they do is they take the animals and they keep them bunched together and they allow them to graze very intensively for a very short period of time and then they move them on and the animals course fertilize the place they were are they they they to weigh the the t of the grass but they don't you all the way to the roots you don't give them time to do that and there are several variations of this but that's the basic idea and and whether it's in a dry  region or whether it's in a say a temperate region like we have here in the northeast i mean there are farms out here now just west of austin where they are doing grass fed beef yes but grass beds fed beef just means that maybe it all the grass these have actually done the restored of development by the grazing land or i so some call it holistic management and there are various names for it and we don't have we don't have a sticker for that we have we have a sticker for ghana but are getting what we need from the natural world the resources we need and we are we talk about sustainable development would be the would be that we can keep doing it into the indefinite future for future generations can do it as well as we we've been doing destructive development yeah and so we can have sustainable development but why should we sustain things that we've broken  know the dust bowl was the most dramatic example i'd guess but we've done a lot of that damage other than the dust bowl so let's fix that and in the process of fixing it we get something back that's better now the natural world works that way there you know there are not records of species that that deplete everything in sight every species has a role to play in the system and so it ends up some kind of a dynamic it's competitive it's all these kinds of things but instead of mimicking it we've been fighting it yes so we make sure there's only one species growing said ecosystems i was thinking right away you're you're back in tune with nature with complex systems that everything is interdependent if this seems to perhaps outlaw things like  going to come back to the restored have again i don't know if this is an ok place to insert this but there is something called jew engineering which is going to fix everything and some of it is pretty wild one of these is well what do you think of that in what are some alternatives there or is this notion that maybe we can we can engineer the planet to do what we want and let's make sure we don't get so hot so we will sprinkle a little fairy dust up in the over the stratosphere that's reflective and it will it will reflect away the sunlight and therefore we can keep building up carbon dioxide which is heat trapping but will put as much heat and therefore doesn't matter that it's trapping more so that's called solar management there are other other proposals as well i mean one of them is it turns out will move carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that way but what they found is that is that as it sinks there are various bacteria that chew on it that re released not only carbon dioxide but methane and nitrous oxide which are also global warming gases so that may not be a good good approach now the nasa can use sciences did a study about a year and a half ago on on climate management they called it and they included geo engineering but they also recognize that we could be planting more for us or why is that different from making more seaweed with with well i think it's very different because i think that's an example of restorative development rather than geo engineering because we're going to restore forests that we've already down cut around going to risk that we're going to restore forests that we have degraded we're going to restore grasslands that have been overgrazed we're going to restore soils that have lost carbon in other words we're putting things back the way they were when the planet functioned well yeah we're moving back in that direction now we're still and we also course have to stop putting these get heat trapping gases in the atmosphere but it is it is quite possible to get into a situation where instead of thinking about technologies that all those things are about is using carbon capture and storage from coal power plants as we keep burning store the ocean and that's before we realised our with our oxide was making the oceans more acidic and and dissolving coral reefs and everything else so there are a lot of issues here other than just global warming and it seemed it seemed to me that all the technology was unnecessary so i've been working with a group of colleagues who are our forest ecologists and carbon cycle experts and so forth and we're finding that  instead of having technology to do this oh and here's where there's another proposal people argue that that if you burn wood instead of coal that doesn't produce any carbon dioxide because over another asses another tree will grow well of course it takes many decades for that and they say oh but that's not really the case it's all absorbed instantly because right now there are more trees growing in the plant or there's more carbon being absorbed by trees in soils than there is being released by cutting trees and and burning them or using them or whatever well i don't you know we also have an ocean that's taking up a quarter of what we have met and forests and soils stop putting it in the right that would get us back down to essentially zero and then if we started restoring things and it absorb carbon dioxide by forests and soils and wetlands and grasslands  if you burn bird wood to make electricity you produce about fifty percent more carbon dioxide than if you burn coal oh i didn't know that you know that's not good in any given day but ok so we're going to capture the carbon dioxide buriat so what's wrong with that well turns out is a pretty inefficient process and you need about you need to build a third power plant for every two you have just run the system for mentioning that ok so then that means we have to cut fifty percent more trees and burn them to make the same amount of electricity and this is probably going to get expensive even if so you really are talking we're sorry we're running out of time about the the you are really talking about you don't have options you have to go to restore it if you're going to have the planet had people going to live on it if that is the option and therefore if we need to get this information out i think the public certainly would embrace it needs to know how damaging agriculture is on the scale that about the way that we do it do you have risen source's what i'd first of all i'm not sure why we're not hearing this in the media  although science sections in newspapers have been cut asked maria tremendously over that here so thank you for doing this program it's important to get well but the thing is that we need to do more and we need to get it to they want to find markets for do materials that's why we have more paper diapers and more throwaway paper i have and there are synthetic materials that are replacing wood so we're not building it you know using it which would have construction and all the rest of it  so the u s forest service has the bright idea that we should cut down more trees and to turn them into wood pellets and burn them instead of coal the u s is currently shipping enough to support a huge coal burning power plant in britain which is going to be out o in twenty twenty five and they will replace it all with wood pellets that are clear cut lands in sell in north carolina turn to pellets shipped across the ocean and counter to zero you burn it but there's all the processing fossil fuel energy that used right and now you don't have any trees there for a long time to the absorbing more carbon that's right so it's a double hit right if you don't think you have to go the restored approach can you give us some quick advice or did we get by say one thing we told told the congress status not to not to put in this requirement they have an amendment that if it if the law is passed will force the government to count all forest put the pressure out there because the public service you know it will benefit area heidi i am very sorry that we have to bring this to a head ache you have been ever so kind to give us all this information thank you very much i know that you don't have any time in your retirement so far to enjoy life but i hope you will thank you very much thank you very much for having me