morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm suzanne gregory and the music that you just heard is obviously not our regular opening theme song what you did here were a few bars american instruments and two choirs were all conducted by demi and sanchez and if you're interested i've actually played this entire recording and past shows at around this time of year and people seem to like the music i believe this recording is still available on amazon or you could check with sykora as invent coover give some support to a local business over there the classical music or whatever and heritage festival records oh ok yes good morning margery margery stewart is here in the studio now of course that isn't a seasonal selection that music isn't a seasonal selection that we have much opportunity to hear but it seemed like a way to introduce today's shows in which marjorie and i are going to talk about among other things the pope's and cyclical allow dato see on care for our common home and of course the pope is from argentina so that's the connection and this is in connection also for us with the it's in the context actually of the climate change summit which continues this week in paris and hopefully our listeners have been tuned in to democracy now nine o'clock every weekday morning on c h l why where they are actually in paris covering the conference brants but good morning marjorie already we've already said thanks for the music i could listen to good operatic tenor yours forever and my field latin american christmas music is the most wonderful yes and that particular recording is quite a good one i think that's you know you'll also find others i think placido domingo recorded some of that music because well at one point anyway we could talk about some things that are happening in paris and it seems to me that well i don't know whether this is good news or not but according to an article in the nation dot com temperature rise of only one and a half degrees settles tremendously who's innocent breakthroughs yes yes no on democracy now this morning they were still talking about two degrees but according to this this article decided long before but in this case they were going to be magnanimous and book to two percent but millions will die at two percent and civil society pressure has been so heavy that the breakthrough is to get to one point five the reality is that cover policies of national governments are at zero for three point five yes yes right so that's the tricky part is getting from the we seem to have a government which is a little more committed than most yes indeed and i know much and all as many a climate change activists have been critical of the whole process and worried that it isn't going to result in nuff change david suzuki has actually expressed quite a lot of hope that we've had such a sea change in canada with not leavin premier not li alberta prime minister trudeau who hasn't come forward with very much yet but seems to have some good intentions and you've got something there that i'm waiting ira yes this is what he said he said we will demonstrate that we're serious about climate change after his four hour dinner with the premier's this means making decisions based on science that means reducing carbon emissions including through carbon pricing towards a climate resilient economy several of the provincial leaders voiced similar sent sentiments and i hope i suzuki mentions that there are plenty of evidence he says a recent report from stanford university and the international renewable energy agency found that it's technically feasible and economically viable for the world to shift to sustainable energy by twenty thirty and this is presumably one hundred percent which is what activists are quite i don't want our world to be doing  hundred percent and twenty thirty of what it's doing today no no no well one hundred percent shift to renewables though whatever that means what do we think that means it cetera there are some significant movements in that direction as we know from germany and denmark for example india has been talking countries called the solar alliance because they're one of the countries with excess solar yeah well so it's definitely a change is coming but we can't go on behaving the same way that we have behaved in terms of ripping apart the surface of the planet no matter where the energy comes from no exactly yeah but hopefully yeah i mean there is a question about where are the materials going to come from to build the solar and w so yes but that so it isn't and the issues certainly about the materials and also the energy to manufacture them but obviously as we gain more renewable energy we can use renewable energy to manufacture further renewable energy equipment i suppose well that's you know i'm not particularly interested in religions have to say however i'm particularly interested in francis's stance opposing the corporations i think that's the most our full thing in loadout o c has made it very very clear that he is not opposed to technology after all he was a chemist as a young man yeah he is not opposed to science and technology at all but he has he has drawn a very very deep line in the sand opposed to corporate controlled of technology and i think that's a courageous thing to do oh absolutely yes client has said the same thing he's it's really a very courageous stand that he's taken he apparently recruited her actually to join some meetings and discussions that were held at the vatican so she she feels of course that he is has the moral off already as well to be making thirty one point two billion they say so i guess one of my questions is not because he connects climate change and degradation to social injustice and inequality and an ethical consumerism and a dysfunctional global economy while advocating solutions having to do with personal transformation and community involvement do you think that's that's a shift in thinking that staking place more generally in the world is he just reflecting something that's already happening naomi klein's book this changes everything addresses some of those same things which is why i guess he runs has said naomi klein are not the only people who have come to these conclusions much earlier than twenty twenty first century what we're seeing is pope francis feeling free to drag his particular group into the twenty first century and that's a very good thing because stephen harper group is firmly mired in the nineteenth century oh yes yes please to be free of that what we need to address is the question of trust and the money that goes with it because everything as one of the articles i picked up recently is about money and trust and people have lost trust in the governments of the nation states for good reason and the governments of the  while we recognize that a great deal of their power has gone to the corporate sector they have the power that's why the corporate sector bust them so we have to figure out a way to use the results of this conference to hold our government's feet to the fire which is a phrase politicians often laughingly use about them selves they understand that very often it's the that's that it's the emotional impact that creates genuine change which all this comes from the people that governments always fall far behind and then when they do come through they're terribly pleased with themselves but we know that the people pushed them well yes exactly exactly and we need to continue doing that because this conference in paris is not the be all in the end all it doesn't as many people have actually said this is where it started and i think celebrate the fact that to that this search of concern about the global discredit traction that's going on because of our lifestyles is today under way and the nation states are beginning to recognize that the fact that they actually finally understand that two percent is not a reasonable target is is a huge breakthrough and if you bear with me i'd just like to read to you what the sixteen coupled with a record human population and the uses of inappropriate technologies are causally linked with the destruction of the whereabouts sustainability us instead of resolving the problems of the poor on thinking of how the world can be different some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate to blame population growth there's a little a little ellipses there to blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some is one way of refusing to face the issues but this it sounds like his own colleagues have leaped forward because you know what the pope is saying there is actually it's betty ho hum it's a typical argument from the global sun no but we do need to look at you know sheer space needed it's not even you know yes people in many other countries consume far less than we do even at greater numbers but of course the the goal is is to reach a higher standard of living i suppose and the birth rate does  drop along with that we've seen evidence of that in many places but the consumption still probably goes up and people take you have to take up more land for farming and so on and in india which was an experience that brought him to an awareness of the plight of the asian elephant and the big problem there is that people are moving into the elephants habitat you know so he after much trial figuring out a war bout what to do founded an organization called elephant family which is a very interesting place to check on the internet and they actually raise money they bags of money from the sort of posh people if you would places like london and new york to purchase some  photo that they're interested in it's the phone of tonight yes that is an issue in canada that's been discussed for a number of years the the large wildlife especially need a lot more space than they've been given in the national parks and they need to be able to move from one national park to another or one kind of sanctuary to another in order to well yeah we are certainly not the most advanced thinkers in the world when it comes to making room for everybody to the other species well what i like about they groups they specific nominal rights groups who are actually trying to make a genuine difference is that they provide to me one of the answers to how to deal with wicked problems which are problems that by themselves have no solution if somebody tells you they found the solution to population you know he's lying or should be because it doesn't have a solution but a piece of the solution will be looking after the elephants and the tigers and the and the deer and whoever needs to eat the day here sorry mate but some people some creatures need to eat deer so to me the question is not how we could fix the all by itself china polluting and creating severe illnesses in its territory they have raised the population of such a large proportion of the world they also have achieved their familial hurt and other stuff hanging around from that nobody has the answer to population but china to castigate china for its various kinds of bad behavior one single handedly sold the global millennial goal and to has held its population in a way that was kind of unthinkable a decade ago so given that the lights are flickering on to move that means that they have is flickering too but we're still with us to be our console seems to be working so i think we're on the air so what we're talking about really is the impact of humans and the impact of francis is talking about yes but he is when he makes that old argument which i remember making forty years ago that old argument yes but it's mostly the intemperate wasteful habits he does talk about ecological debt though as well in the very next paragraph actually after the population one he said in equity affects not only individuals but entire countries and that applies to canada and the united states as well i think elsewhere he says you know in poorer countries you know you have these incredibly wealthy elites and then  priest who traveled through california missions while california was still part of mexico and some all along well subsequently to that i don't know all the details the indigenous california kind of disappeared there are still a few but but it's very very rare like the so supposed to have been completely destroyed by the population of nova scotia except for the people who say except for me and me and me so does that mean they were assimilate it means they've been around and they still regard themselves as be able to i just haven't been recognizes they don't be visible not just simple i interesting i think it's the true california for i'm not bogota he made a public apology for the behavior of the cut catholic church in the americas but the spokespeople for the indians of california are pointing out there are disgusting behavior to the latin american indigenous peoples was was carried out so how can he at one on his journey towards north america how can he announce that he apologizes for  at the catholic church did to the it did you just peoples and then by the time he arrives in california he has not to repudiate had these offensive papal bulls of the fifteenth century and he goes ahead and canonized as soon a pen or center it you see well you know even stephen harper if i recall correctly called the pope to account on not apologizing even casts a bit of a shadow i met music that we played at the top as a show and hope if we have time play a little bit more of that at the end because even though  used indigenous instruments and folk melodies there are folk forms i suppose you could say and rhythms in his work it's to speak they they will talk about a song that was given to them and know the question is there's an element of cultural appropriation here and i'm not big on those people who go around throwing their weight around against anybody who does anything saying it's cultural appropriation but i do think it's sensitivities change and what's interesting about the pope's position or lack of pos on the indigenous peoples of california is a comparison with what was going on as he was building his career in the catholic church in argentina because argentina of course is the land of the  has a very again a very skit so he'd history because there are people who will attest to the fact that he helped them political dissidents were helped specifically by him and he the y will testify to that but at the same time he was no uska romero at the same time he insisted that the priests under his leadership would could continue with their social background when if there are senior people and the things that really a poll me there are two things that are poll me about the dirty war and one of them is the fact that they keep the pregnant women and i until they had their babies and the babies were given to childless military families and families close to the close to the winter and these these kids are in their thirty's and some of them know that disappeared to so this is a murky there and there are a lot of documents that were hidden by the argentinean church they really don't want them to come tonight to show how close they were to th murderous who into so francis is treading a very careful path and he obviously must have learned a great deal as he grew up in that appalling  so we're thankful to him to see but we also recognize that this is a pragmatist is it yeah it makes you wonder whether he has actually learn something changed or whether he's being pragmatic as you say is just trying to cover up the past well the catholic church i believe is shrinking all the churches are shrinking and it depends on how you measure that because there are people who go to please their mothers and there are people who state so the catholic church definitely is concerned about numbers and it would be foolish to retain a fifteenth century attitude in the twenty first century so it makes perfect sense for said francis and his love of the air and its love of the animals to be resurrected and  july first that the vatican might divest from hits fossil fuel investments it has it has a bank of course i know there's an argument that only a very tiny amount of their money is invested in fossil fuels and i don't know what's happened since a z and divest yes exactly exactly but it says here in this article it's in connection with naomi klein's participation with the pope actually but it says that george pell the australian cardinal who serves as the pope's chief economic minister is known to be a climate change denier and there are people with even a calf it within the vatican i guess who think that the pope shouldn't be getting involved in these political issues so he is he is fighting a bit of a battle there within his own well they don't have to be and india has a pretty interesting position on fossil fuels because as i mentioned earlier they're very interested in getting into solar for obvious reasons but also they like to point out and india is the perfect place to pointed out that the consumption of bread meat contributes a far more dangerous gas to the climate than actually the the burning of fossil fuels to in other words and at some think that is the elephant in our living room because people in this town and in this this country are all heavy each others of interest really produce meat so if you're eating industrial product produced beet reduce it because that's one of the worst polluters because know corps it might be argued that they they have coeds running around loose in india they've produced methane as well but i should i would suggest not in the concentrations that happen in the does what you told me what is feeding the seafood and i hate to have to say it dairy industry are these confined animal feeding operations which are both vicious milk a great deal in their diet oh absolutely there's another thing and they're both in india and china there are technologies for the simple technologies for capturing methane so they take the cow dung and the other farm wastes of all sorts probably including human and they basically compost them in a pit or in a yeah let's say in a pit in india there they put a steel kind of dalmiya over that as the methane is generated the dome rises then when it gets to as far as it's going to go i guess then the top off the methane and they burn it as fuel which okayed might still produce c o two but it's it's dealing and he's been very very firm in his opposition to inappropriate technologies and corporate ownership of the trees i just didn't want to let a moment go past without expressing my irritation with those people who slough off the methane issue by making jokes about cows far to get get real grow up and reduce the red meat consumption from industrially produced meat to figure out how to fix the data at the same time yes for those who think they need their meat there are other sources of course you know buy from local farmers exactly what we've always done in our family and it's because we started early that we're ahead of a lot of people in our practice as so i have so many things to learn about oh we buy our meat from people we know we know how the animals were raised and treated but strangely enough this year because i've taken on a witness stay after didn't commitment i have been unable to attend the summer i'm that winter bucket and because i'm unable to attend the winter bucket i don't have my chicken purchases and control and as a result the two of us are eating far less chicken because there's no way i'm going to buy the case for chicken so you have to get these practices a grade because i'm going to have to get my act together in january i'm going to have to go to the people i know who produce chicken and stock up ye chest freezer at the moment is full to the brim with the recent arrival of half a side of pork from a happy pig live to a fred land near by and how to pretty good life compared with most pics and of course we should say something about vegans and vegetarians too because there's nothing wrong with having a diet that simply doesn't have meat and i don't know you even even a vegetarian who has milk you know dairy products and eggs is in some ways exploiting those animals even know in that if they're part of or whatever those those locally raised on amounts are not really exploited domesticated domestication is a subject we should talk about some time as the human animal is now domesticated to isn't it oh yeah and we need to talk about flesh biomass on the planet and who's flesh is replacing all the other flip that gets back to the population vacancy in the vegetarians let them know to contribute to for instance to the destruction of the brazilian rainforest it's no longer the burgers it's the so i plan to so to get back to cup twenty one of the climate conference one of the big issues is how to encourage brazil and into nice year to reduce the destruction of the rain forest so if you're eating so i think about that yes indeed indeed there's a crazy old statement that was made i think by the prime minister of malaysia many years ago who said that our forests will do  much more good if they're all cut down and we banked the money from selling them that they do standing here ready of course that's that's just  protected if they were privately owned which reminds me there is a little short film oh i wish i had written down the website where you can find this because i wasn't thinking of it for today's show but there is a little short film in which it is contended that whales can actually contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases and the way they do that is  believe which fertilizes the phytoplankton which is an essential thing along with the forests for absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and  phytoplankton is the plant version of the little tiny way always come back to some kind of discussion of balance out of balance things have become yes yes yes so that really is what  cyclical is talking about it's talking about let's get back into harmony with nature which is precisely what the indigenous peoples have been talking about all through long the period in which these people encyclopaedia and the psychic close these people in cycling tell us about christian empire are opposed to finally they're going to have to come around and admit that the people who were pre christian where ourselves are dust of the earth which of course is from genesis our very bodies are made up of her elements we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her water and that leads to all kinds of i remember craig evans on this show is saying that when he when he's out in on his farm he he can feel how he's he ingesting v the product things that you know come down from the bay minerals that come down from mt benson in the water for example and that sort of thing and that's a kind the minerals and they antibodies that if they need to be healthy grow he opened beings so to me when when people go weeping to people who won't get involved in crazy research on the human bio in order to save one sickly child they they don't really represent all of us they're there they're being pretty self centered in what they want out of science and  that's a difficult thing for scientists to cope with because we really don't want consciousness scientists i was reading about one recently who is about to become the first person to transplant a human ted oh  goodness now the idea is he has he has the volunteer for the head there's a guy with a good head and a deformed and and crippled didn't and sick b i don't know if he has the volunteer for the body i think that won't be a volunteer because i think be somebody who has mental capacities or are shot however when he's ready to do it he's going to do it with a team of about one hundred surgeons and it will cost in the millions of dollars but he says of course the price will come to more stuff that to me is something that says to me this man  needs to have a conscience implant exactly exactly i'm just wondering i'm not sure if i can quickly find something here one thirty one to one thirty six to be exact and i was surprised that he did that he wasn't more opposed to genetic modification because that an impression that he wasn't fully aware of what genetic modification it was that gene splicing and not just traditional breeding cross breeding and so on and so he may need to be educated more on that particular topic well and there may be pressures within the vatican maybe they have a lot more investment in foot corporations than they do  little bit of excess money into and he said nothing  oh is it not a secret to divest no no of course alberta was talking about not having their electricity generated by coal in the future so that's a good thing but yeah it's  number one the takes on the corporations and number two the tea takes on inappropriate technology and the number two should have been that he promotes civil society he wants civil society involved in a decision making in a way that they've been kept out of it for a long time so civil society at twenty what has had an enormous breakthrough and has the european union the u is wonderful something else that i'm not sure that we've we've mentioned it is the connection between climate change and war in the problems in syria for example and naomi klein says and you can find this article linked to her website naomi klein dot org but secretary u s secretary of state john kerry has said it's not a coincidence that immediately prior to the civil war in syria the country experienced its worst drought on record as many as a million and a half people migrated from syria's farms to its cities intensifying political unrest that was just beginning to roil and boil in the region so she has an article there that was published in the new york her about how the route to peace is through fixing climate or doing something about climate change if so is going to do something real about climate change it will have an impact on anything that's the thing about which could problems anything useful we can  reduce is the wickedness of the problem ah yes ah yes so for those who say that we're hooped anyway there is no point in even bothering to do anything because we're just all going to love the tubes i think that's the point to be made isn't that the the more you chip away at something the more you might just have a hope of of making a you know changing the course of the titanic if you would i don't know why these people both are getting up in the morning well yeah right without hope and actually i think i don't know i have hope no i think what i have is determination to make one more effort and one more effort and one more effort in the very faint hope that something might work out yes right right and time is short in all there is discussion about how whatever agreement is arrived at in paris it's going to have to be modified as time goes on and you know getting fine tuned at fine tuned right and it will be and can be because i think the you know the  development of renewable energy technology and in implementation is probably going faster than the politicians even realize so that's a good thing i you know people even they all make line herself says you know we don't have time for this waiting to tweak things we have to get it right now but yet as you say this this save us all and save our biosphere well it could but but let's talk about the into debt for a moment because we've become completely i have become completely dependent on the internet for  internet will we lose our opportunity to compete communicate with people like me because nobody should reading any more people only scan things that's really a problem so maybe we ought to have internet free days where we actually live a real life with real people there is an interesting fart yes getting back to real life hounds on yes yes yes good thinking we are just  encourage people to read the actual document itself and naomi klein has said the same thing you can you know you can search that just load out to see pope francis or whatever go right to the vatican website it's in  it's two hundred forty six paragraphs long so not all that long really don't go with our interpretation or anyone else's get the ideas for yourself  of course stay in touch with the issues at three fifty dot org leap manifesto dot org which we haven't even mentioned but that's an important initiative and the un sustainable development goals lot of people concept of sustainable development there's nothing wrong with the concept of such they enable development so long as it's not a bunch of lies right exactly and that's a whole a whole nother show so thank you marjorie thanks very much for being here today to me and to changes next week for librarians on the radio and we're going to go out with at least part of another track from  behalf of our production team thanks so much for joining u