This is Democracy – Episode 61: International Environmental Activism

Multiple Speakers:                         This is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational and intersectional, unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi:                         Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. We’re very fortunate this week we have an opportunity to talk to one of the leading international figures in the world of environmental activism and scholarship around environmental issues. He is Alon Tal, he’s, as I said, one of the leading environmental activists and academics in Israel. He’s the founder of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, the founder of the Arava Institute for environmental studies and he’s a professor as well as chair of the department of public policy at Tel Aviv university, which is one of the great universities, not just of the middle East, but of the world alone. It’s wonderful to have you here.

Alon Tal:                       It is terrific to be here. Thanks for the invitation. It’s great to be in Texas.

Jeremi:                         We’re so happy to have you here. We’re going to open of course with our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Siri, what is your poem titled today, Zachary?

Zachary:                       Nothing.

Jeremi:                         Nothing? Okay.

Zachary:                       The title is Nothing.

Jeremi:                         Okay, let’s hear something about nothing.

Zachary:                       Nothing. Cities don’t take long to sink underwater into the ominous depths. When the waves come to Miami and New York, what will they do with the leftover concrete? Seas don’t take long to become desert and dry sand. When the clouds leave the arrow forever, what will they do with the leftover salt? Houses don’t take long to fold in heavy winds. When the hurricanes wash along the coastlines, what will they do with all the plywood in the streets? Leaders don’t take long to forget all the suffering people they’ve met. When promises and obligations are forgotten, what will we do with all the empty words. And why are we left just taping jumbled letters to construction fences just to see some meaning in the words, the sounds and smells of the sand blown from the dump trucks in the wind, and why do we keep finding ourselves taping prayers to the roofs of our minds to send our worries into some invisible electrical signal to some higher power in boats across the Mediterranean.

Zachary:                       And what will we do when the UN is flooded by the East river? When Brussels in the winter feels like Barcelona, where will they go to do nothing when you can’t ski in the Swiss Alps and mountain resorts where they do nothing. What will we do with all the pages they put on PDFs for us to read so they can forget them? It doesn’t take long to lose a planet, to lose a home. When we’ve destroyed it all, where will they meet to do nothing?

Jeremi:                         Hmm. That’s a somewhat morose poem this week, Zachary.

Zachary:                       Yeah.

Jeremi:                         What are you trying to say?

Zachary:                       Well, I think this is really about sort of the frustration that I think many people feel and in fact, I think many other politicians feel in that is that when leaders come together in these big like summits to try and solve climate change problems, it seems that there’s a lot of big talk, a lot of words put forth on PDFs and things like that and we don’t actually come to some solid agreement and nothing ends up being done because there are so many different parties and so many.

Jeremi:                         I would just add that to hear a poem like this from a 14 year old actually brings to my mind the only really positive thing we can say about the present situation in our attempt to get to climate stability and that is that it’s the one issue I think since the 1960s where we feel a younger generation is genuinely pushing the establishment and the grownups to do something and putting a mirror in front of our face and saying this is not acceptable. And of course Greta is the leading figure, but lots and lots of young people like your son who are out there really speaking truth to power.

Jeremi:                         So I salute you and I agree with everything, it was quite inspiring poem.

Jeremi:                         Alon, is it making a difference or, or are these young people affecting outcomes?

Alon Tal:                       Well, I think that part of the problem in climate change from the start is that it seems so remote. It’s something that’s happens very incrementally. And so, yes, we know that there’ll be tipping points, but eventually the water really won’t flood the Manhattan for another 50, 60 years. So we’re leaving this problem to our kids. So it really does come to this issue of transgenerational justice. And so I think what happened this summer with all the bad news from Greenland and the Amazon, whatever, and this cry and I would say voicing of the frustration, anger of a younger generation is that people began to say, “Oh, maybe this is something which we can no longer put off. There’s always pressing and important demands, this has now become a pressing and important demand.”

Jeremi:                         And why is it so hard for leaders who, of all different kinds of political stripes, who claim to care about their nations and care about the future? Why is it so hard for them to address this?

Alon Tal:                       Well, it has to do with the time horizons of politicians that they don’t usually see between four or five years. The kind of investments we need to make to change our economy are things that take more than four or five years to see the return benefit on it. And in general, it’s very hard for politicians to think in the long-term. It’s just not built into the human DNA. Remember our brains evolved from small groups of people. The most we could ever think about was 30 or 40 people. So to get your arms around future generations and a hundred years, it’s just a very difficult thing to do.

Jeremi:                         But we live in societies, particularly you and I in the United States and Israel where we had generations like we can think of the founding generation of both of our societies that clearly thought in terms of generations. Why have we lost that or have we lost that?

Alon Tal:                       You’re absolutely right. During Israel’s first decade when people were being rationed four eggs a day, maximum protein, we still put 60% of our overall investment infrastructure into water systems that would provide water so that everybody around the country could buy water inexpensively and in dry land areas, just like Texas knows too, provide for an agricultural economy. And that is that a tremendous sacrifice by a founding generation who just wanted it to be better for their kids. And so when I think about this often, I think about this notion of the politics of sacrifice. Can we get a generation to go back to these kinds of values? And it’s tough because we are very, very individualistic and we’re at some extent self-indulgent. But I think we can remind ourselves that every parent knows that just how much they’re capable of sacrificing.

Alon Tal:                       It’s something you don’t understand until that baby’s crying and you’re dying to sleep and you get up and you feed it and walk the floors with it anyway. And I think if we can frame this as something that we owe our kids some hope of climatic stability, that’s a way to frame the issue.

Jeremi:                         Is that something you work on?

Alon Tal:                       I work on it all the time in different ways, different contexts. But yeah, I think it’s something that unites environmentalists around the world.

Jeremi:                         And what are some of the framings that you found that have been most effective?

Alon Tal:                       Well, in Israel, of course we are a dry land country. And most of the time when I go around the world and talk, I can’t always explain what this means, when you speak in Texas, people get it. So for us, a few years of drought means a whole lot.

Alon Tal:                       And that’s what we’ve seen. For example, the sea of Galilee, which is of course the world’s lowest freshwater lake, but most people know of it as sort of the place where Jesus preached much of his life and walked across the waters presumably. And it reached its lowest point in recorded history this past November. So these are things which we recognize and for Israelis, this is their only place where they have any kind of a recreational outlet with fresh water. We can’t let that go and turn into another Aral Sea or Lake Chad or whatever’s your example. So I think water resources is one way that we can bring these issues home and do it. I spend a lot of time trying to work on those issues and of course the whole challenge of trying to reverse the six extinction and deal with biodiversity is really perhaps the most single, most pressing and irreversible problem we faced.

Jeremi:                         In the American tradition, in our history, we often use apocalyptic warnings as a way of mobilizing people. So think about the warnings of nuclear war in the 1950s and duck and cover drills and things of that sort. It does seem that those apocalyptic warnings aren’t as effective today.

Alon Tal:                       It’s funny, I have a very close colleague named Dory Carrot who has developed with other experts this notion that she calls positive sustainability and she often says much more gently that I’m going to say now, “Alon, you have a fine tradition of preaching doom and gloom.” I’m a very big advocate about addressing overpopulation and trying to get to some sort of carrying capacity that’s reasonable and said, “You’re not going to do it by scaring people because that tends to paralyze. People need hope. You need to give them these elements.” And she dips into the literature of positive psychology, which is you need to give people small, implementable tasks they can get their arms around and they don’t feel this kind of complete alienation and sensible inability to change anything. So we have to give people that hope and practical things to do.

Jeremi:                         And this has started locally in many cases.

Alon Tal:                       Right.

Jeremi:                         Zachary?

Zachary:                       Well, climate change is an issue that’s so international that one country just deciding to change course can’t reverse the whole problem. How do we bring together so many different parties with so many different points of view on this issue to actually solve a problem that affects the whole world?

Alon Tal:                       This is the great challenge of international environmental law. I teach courses in it and it’s a very frustrating, I’ve represented Israel at UN conventions where you sit there with 192 people and you’re locked into this lowest common denominator scheme. That’s the way international conventions or agreements are designed, you want everybody on board, and that means that you often have to have language that you feel is completely fluffy and doesn’t get you there, but it’s your only hope.

Alon Tal:                       When I talk about in Israel, this was a small country where only now approaching 9 million people. We have a lot of space in the news, but in fact it’s a small country. So oftentimes, and you raise this issue, they say, “Well, our situation is so exceptional. We have such great security challenges in the Middle East and our emissions are so modest. Why would it matter?” And I always give them example from the military. All of us in Israel have been soldiers. I was in the paratroopers and one of the things they do in Israeli army training is give you the challenge of carrying your buddies around on stretchers. Sometimes as much as 30 or 40 miles in tough terrain, in the heat or whatever. And the notion is when you are in a battlefield situation and a friend of yours is wounded and you need to run them to the back of the line to a medic four or five kilometers back, if you know you’ve done it 60 or 70 kilometers, four or five kilometers or nothing, and invariably in any of these units, there’s always one person when the going gets tough and you’re exhausted, somehow they don’t change.

Alon Tal:                       When you raise your hand and say, “My shoulder’s really hurting. Now I’m tired, could somebody else take the stretcher?” They don’t come under there and we know very quickly who they are and they don’t last. And we have a very, very derogatory term, which we won’t use here, which we describe those kinds of people. But basically they’re misanthropic people who have no place in a combat unit.

Jeremi:                         And they become politicians.

Alon Tal:                       In some countries. But my point is that we in Israel can’t become that soldier doesn’t get under the international stretcher that is going to carry us into some sort of better future in terms of our climatic situation. And we have to all realize that if we’re not all under that stretcher, then the injured planet earth will not get to safety.

Jeremi:                         It’s such a wonderful metaphor because one of the things that any historical analysis teaches us is that even though we might see ourselves as the center of the universe, if we’re the CEO or the president or whatever, that over time, we’re really just one person holding up a stretcher. A stretcher we don’t actually control. But it does seem as if in our social media and world today, in our world of hyper individualism and consumption, this is a hard message for people in both of our societies, I think. And it’s striking how both of our societies have changed on this.

Alon Tal:                       I want to say a word or two and I don’t want to get politically biased here, but I want to say a word or two in praise of the previous President of the United States, Barack Obama. Because when we look at what progress has been made, if you want to look at something concrete, there was this agreement in Paris which took place in 2015 where the world for the first time really committed itself across the board, even developing countries to quantitative measurable reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. It didn’t happen by itself. It happened because there was an almost obsessive Secretary of State by the name of John Kerry who went around to over 92 world leaders and played hardball and said, “Listen, we’ll help you financially. We’ll support you militarily, but you need to submit an INDC, a national action plan about what you’re going to do for climate change.”

Alon Tal:                       Barack Obama won very early in his presidency a Nobel peace prize. I don’t know if he deserved it then, but by the end of Paris, he certainly deserved it because we need that kind of leadership. And so when you say how do you sell it? I think it goes to leadership. We need somebody to stand up and call people to be their higher selves. We’ve had it in war times and in a sense this is almost a warlike situation. So I look to the world for leadership and there are some bright hopes there, but unfortunately not everybody’s listened to the prime minister of New Zealand. But I do believe that this is cyclical and there will be, great leaders will step up to inspire us.

Jeremi:                         It’s sort of like you need someone under the stretcher who calls upon everyone to be better at holding the stretcher up and not try to do it himself or herself, but also not absconding without doing his or her duty.

Alon Tal:                       I mean that that was indeed when George W. Bush was the president, when he was sort of stalling on climate change, he argued that was the problem that China and India are not on board and therefore he could not cripple American industries with expectations. But today China and India are onboard, and I would argue, unfortunately because of President Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for climate change agreements, they’re actually moving forward at a faster pace than the US is and so I think today we do have that. And that all comes from the Paris Accord, which has not fallen despite the retreat in the American commitment to it. So I do think there’s a basis for help. And you know, it’s like a lot of things, it’s an imperfect system, the UN and all these agreements, but it’s the only one we got so we have to make it work.

Jeremi:                         So, you’re a scholar of the environment and a public policy. If you were brought in by the next Israeli prime minister and they’ll probably be a new one soon or the next American president, what would you emphasize as the first steps to take in world leadership?

Alon Tal:                       Well, I think about this a lot. I’m, like I said, in a political party and I assume that my party will form the government and we’ll have the ministry of environment portfolio. And I hope to have a senior position there and one of the things that I would start with is, well, if our founding fathers, had a very visionary founding father David [inaudible 00:14:21] was looking at, what would he say, he would have said, “We have to become very quickly the very first carbon neutral country.”

Alon Tal:                       There is no reason today, technologically, that a country could not be moved to a hundred percent renewables by 2030. In terms of capacity, Denmark is already at 50% and it used to be they’d say, “Well they have the problem that the sun doesn’t shine at night so we can’t do solar energy.” But the remarkable drop in prices, in storage capacity in lithium batteries in the last two years is unimaginable, it’s going to go down another 50%, that figure in the next two, three years. So already, to build power plants that rely on natural gas is irresponsible. You are saddling the next generation with infrastructure which is no longer the cheapest and the best. So thank heavens there has been dramatic technological advancement to make it easier to give us that sort of tailwinds to move forward.

Alon Tal:                       So I would start with, let’s start saying we have to cut 6% a year of emissions. The way to start of course is to make solar option the default power supply unless you have access to wind or to geothermal or something.

Jeremi:                         Right. And that’s a wonderful connection to UT because one of the inventors of the lithium ion battery who just won the Nobel prize, Dr. Goodenough is one of our faculty. And this is a case where technology really opens opportunities, doesn’t it?

Alon Tal:                       It is. You would like to think that people are going to do it by eating less beef and taking electric scooters or bicycles to work. And that is part of the solution. I don’t want to absolve this responsibility. But if somebody is pragmatic, it’s much easier as a policymaker to disseminate technologies which are cheaper. If we only had the political will.

Zachary:                       But how do you convince sort of everyday people that by helping to solve climate change, which seems like this far away problem, they’re not going to be sacrificing the very quality of life that they’re supposed to be trying to protect by implementing these measures?

Alon Tal:                       Well, that’s sometimes a hard sell when you want to say, well you want to pay a higher price for electricity. The amazing thing today now is that if you actually look at the numbers, if you want to build a new energy generating capacity, this was growing very quickly, we’re have to provide three or 4% increase in electricity generation every year. It’s just less expensive. So the energy thing is not that much tougher to do. If you wanted to convince somebody to buy an electric car, I think it’s very easy to make the case that within four or five years, that car is going to be saving you money.

Alon Tal:                       People used to be so anxiety ridden about why it can be stuck without a charge. I have a friend in San Francisco just got one of the latest Teslas and he’s got the money to buy it, but he says he can go all the way to Los Angeles and back on one charge. So, again, technology is coming to the rescue, but ultimately I am an optimist. I believe people are fundamentally good. And if you give them a challenge and say, “Let’s do the right thing.” Ladybird Johnson, I was walking around the Johnson Library, she did it on beautification and throwing trash in there. It affected me as a kid growing up in the United States. I remember that all the norms, if anybody would think of throwing a piece of trash, they were embarrassed to do that because people do want to do the right thing by the people around them. I think ultimately people are altruistic.

Jeremi:                         That’s what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. And I think we have to remember that that’s there. That’s a good point to transition to how we always like to close our podcast, which is on positive steps that our listeners can take in their own lives to make a difference and using this history and analysis to empower them. So what’s your advice, especially to our young listeners, Alon?

Alon Tal:                       Well, first of all, in terms of transportation, everybody who’s a cyclist or anybody who has legs to walk to school as opposed to getting a ride is already making a concrete and real contribution. That’s the thing about climate change. It can be anything. Recently, I want to recommend a brand new documentary I saw two days ago with the heads of our political party called Game Changers.

Alon Tal:                       It’s produced by this guy, Cameron, who made the Titanic and all these other things. But it is a movie which provides, I think, completely compelling evidence about the advantages of a plant based diet, something which has been very slow for me taking. But when my daughter came home from the Israeli army and said, I’ve decided I’m moving from vegetarian to vegan because in the Israeli army they’ve made it so easy because Israel has the highest percentage of vegans in the world. In the age ranges of 15 and 25 or 30 it’s off the chart. And some of it has to do with animal welfare. But there’s a lot to be said for better athletic performance. And of course the environmental benefits. 17% of our carbon footprint comes from the beef industry.

Alon Tal:                       Now, I know that’s a hard sell here in Texas, but I think that this is something that more and more people are beginning to see that not only is it not healthy to eat so much meat and not only is it bad for the planet, but if you’re a professional football player, you’re going to be having much better performance if you eat a plant based diet. So think about it. Don’t have to become a vegetarian or vegan overnight, but you can certainly do the meatless Monday. And you know, maybe if you eat meat once or twice a week as opposed to seven days a week, you’ve also done something very important to save this a troubled earth of ours.

Jeremi:                         So no brisket for you on Passover?

Alon Tal:                       No brisket for me on Passover, I’ll just stick with a gefilte fish and probably the other equivalent. But I think there’s many things to do and there’s not a one size fits all. The most important thing is don’t think you have to do everything, but take a step in the right direction and feel you’re part of something global. And again, I’ll start back where I began, that this is something that the younger generation is coming together.

Alon Tal:                       These climate strikes that we have them in Israel, I don’t know if they have them here in Austin.

Jeremi:                         Yes, and we did a whole episode on actually the students who organized the climate strike here in Austin.

Alon Tal:                       Well that’s tremendous for us. It’s literally high school kids and we have them lying down on the streets and saying we demand better. I salute that kind of revolutionary spirit. It’s what exactly we need to rattle the cage a bit.

Jeremi:                         Very well said. Zachary, does this provide hope for your generation? There’s so many problems in the world. Is this an organizing principle, a motivating factor?

Zachary:                       Yes. I really think it’s something that really motivates young people from all sides of the spectrum. Because it’s something that we see will really affect us when we get to be our parents’ age, but at the same time, I do think there’s a very much a growing frustration with the way that people feel like they’ve improved themselves, but on a larger national scale, international communities and international organizations have not been able to come together to solve solution.

Alon Tal:                       Well, I have to end you on a more positive note. When I was coming of age, a little bit older than you, but not much. The issue was the depletion of the ozone layer. The hole in the ozone layer was considered to be, it was an existential problem. If you live in Argentina or in Australia, you knew that you could not go swimming without doing a full body suit because you’re going to get skin cancer. The UV radiation coming from the sun was not going to be deflected because the ozone layer was being depleted by CFCs and freons and other chemicals we were releasing the environment, and the United nations made a treaty and it wasn’t tough enough. And actually a conservative politician, Margaret Thatcher said, you know what, we can do better. And she called all the world leaders to London and they made a very tough schedule.

Alon Tal:                       And you know what? Today the ozone layer is healing itself. Now that was a magic bullet there in terms of the technological solution, but it showed the world community works together. This was a problem that seemed insolvable that was going to bring us down and we overcame it. So, there are solutions. Same thing with whales. They were going, going, gone. And yet now with new whaling conventions in place down for several years, they have rebounded. We have to do our part and policymakers have to send clear messages and let nature be resilient.

Jeremi:                         And I think it’s such an important message that you’ve delivered Alon based on your scholarship and your eloquent words. Historical change happens with consciousness rising.

Alon Tal:                       Amen.

Jeremi:                         There was a time when society’s had dueling and then dueling was ended. There was a time when slavery was common, right?

Jeremi:                         And as you say, there was a time when people didn’t care about the ozone layer. And what changes is when a generation decides that they won’t accept that anymore. It might not change their politicians immediately, but it changes their behavior patterns. And, to me, I’m so optimistic because I meet so many young people and they all care about this, whether they are a Democrat or Republican, Arab or Jewish. I think actually this crisis could be something around the environment that actually brings people together.

Zachary:                       It affects everyone.

Jeremi:                         It affects everyone. And we’re fortunate to have scholars and activists and politicians like you, Alon, who are making this happen.

Alon Tal:                       And it’s fortunate people like yourself, academics who spread these good words around the world and to young people who are putting into words what we maybe all feel, but don’t quite know how to say. So thanks for that as well.

Jeremi:                         Well, this has been another wonderful episode of This is Democracy. Please look up Alon Tal on the web. His bio will be listed with our program. He’s done some remarkable work and I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from many of our listeners, and thank you for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy

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