Interview Transcript-Peter Godfrey-Smith

FRANCESCA: If we squeeze the entire history of the Earth into one single year, humans would show up in the last 30 minutes of the final hour. But life has been around for way longer, about 3.7 billion years. So what has all that life been up to all this time?

In his latest book, Living on Earth, philosopher Peter Godfrey Smith offers a fresh look at how living things have shaped our planet. His previous books, Other Minds and Metazoa, dove into the mystery of how conscious minds emerged on Earth.

But in Living on Earth, he flips the script and explores what happens when we see organisms as active creators, not just products of evolution. The planet we live on is largely the result of the work of other living beings, who shape the environments that we now are so drastically modifying.

And what lesson does that hold for our relationship to the other creatures with whom we share this wondrous and beautiful planet? Maybe kinship is the answer. It's the frame Peter Godfrey Smith suggests and applies to such issues as the lives of domestic animals and how we should approach wilderness.

Peter Godfrey Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where he researches the philosophies of biology and the mind. Living on Earth is his seventh book.

Peter Godfrey Smith, welcome to Writer's Voice.

PGS: It's a pleasure to be here.

FR: This book, Living on Earth, is fundamentally, I think, about the nature of our relationship to the world around us and the life that inhabits the world with us. What compelled you to write this book, understanding that in some ways it's the third in a series, but this one in particular?

PGS: Yes, the fact that it's the third in a series was important. The first one was built around a particular part of the history of animal life, this deep fork in the evolutionary tree that on one road leads to us, on the other road leads to octopuses and various other animals.

The second one was about many more animals, most animal groups, but all the way through those books the emphasis was on the idea of the mind as a product, as something that evolution had built, had installed on the scene, and there is the other side, which is the mind as cause rather than the mind as effect, and it was always sitting there as the other element or the other aspect that had to be told.

The geneticist Richard Lewontin, a scientist who died a few years ago after a very distinguished career at Harvard, he always made a big thing about the idea that when describing evolutionary processes you shouldn't just describe living things as outcomes, as products, as effects.

The world that we are dealing with is in many ways, in large part, shaped by what they've done, and in the case of some organisms, certainly us, as a consequence of what we've decided to do. So the mind-as-cause angle was missing from the story and had to be put back in.

FR: So in other words, not only must we understand the effect of the world on us, but our effect on the world.

PGS: That's right. In another conversation I had about the book, a phrase came up, which I've come to think of as a very useful way of thinking about the book, which is that much of the book is a kind of a history of choice, an evolutionary history of choice.

And part of the point of the book is that we walk through the evolutionary history of choice, of efficacy, of organisms doing things, and then in the last part of the book, the third chunk of chapters, it's time to start thinking about how we might improve our choices in the light of our understanding of that history.

So although I don't think there's a kind of direct line, you know, here's how the past was, here's what we should do now, I don't think it's like that.

The hope is that there's such a thing as a kind of informing of our reflections on our next steps that can come out of the history of choice.

FR: Right. And when you talk about choice, I mean, we're jumping ahead a bit, so I think we'll probably go back to it in more depth, but that also implies that there is a right of choice of other beings on this planet, not just us.

PGS: A right of choice. That's interesting. I don't think it implies that. I see the sequence of ideas.
And I hadn't thought of it, I hadn't thought about it from that angle before. Let me just have a second to think about that, because this really is a different way of phrasing it.

FR: And maybe just to clarify it, I'm really thinking of right in terms of a moral choice, in the way that you talk about morality, about ethics later on in the book.

FR: That's how I interpreted the question, and that's what was a bit unexpected. Let me just think about that for a second.

I guess I don't think that, and I don't think it's implied. So how did you put it? I mean, I realize this threatens to mess things up. It's just too interesting not to do it properly, though.

FR: Yeah, because when you said that we have made choices, that it's a question of choice, not just that we change the world because we're not thinking about it, but it's just happening. It's not a byproduct.
We're changing the world through intention. But I think that your book really does imply, I mean, that's not just a human thing. I mean, other animals also do that.

And it felt to me that in the latter part of your book, in the last two chapters, you were really arguing that not only do animals do that, but that they have a right to have that ability preserved.
I mean, thinking particularly in terms of your critique of industrialized farming, factory farming.

PGS: I don't think it's implied. I don't think it's something that's a kind of an automatic or even for me an entirely natural consequence of those earlier chapters. What we reach is an understanding of the role that choice has played. We reflect on our own capacity to choose.

And one of the things that we have to work out is how to value various things that can happen in the lives of other animals, including their choices, including the suffering and the well-being that they undergo, and so on.

The idea of rights as in some sense naturally given or as following from very general observations about the world is one that I do resist, and that's just part of my ethical orientation in philosophy.

I think that rights are political constructs, basically. They're very good political constructs, you know, I value them as political constructs, but I don't think of rights as things that are inherent in nature pretty much at all. And that is a somewhat controversial thing to say.

Now given that, when we look around at other animals, non-human animals, and think both about the kinds of lives they live in the wild and the kinds of lives that we've imposed upon them, one thing that we need to do, I think, is to change the way that we value various of their activities and our actions.
Bestowing rights is one kind of somewhat politically guided way of approaching that.

Another way of handling it is merely to try to reduce suffering. And I think that's entirely coherent.
It doesn't really go through the pathway of consideration of rights. You can express it in terms of a right not to suffer needlessly, or something like that.

But in philosophy, the utilitarian tradition has tended to just directly argue from the badness of suffering to a kind of responsibility we have to reduce it. And that's a viable path too.

Your question is very interesting. I hadn't thought about it in the particular way that you have phrased it. I hadn't thought about it at all like that.

The idea that reflection on the history of choice as part of the history of the Earth might motivate us to recognize a right to choose as a general feature of things. It's attractive. I find myself resisting it a little, in part because of this general commitment to not seeing rights as naturally given, but as political constructs. And then thinking that I'm not sure that the best way forward to improve our relationships with non-human nature is through this concept, is through the concept of a right.

As you can tell, this really has me thinking. I may get off this call and decide and rethink some of these things. It's a very thought-provoking angle.

FR: Well, I'm honored to be able to provoke you in that way. So what you're saying, in a way, there's two ways.

One is rights as a kind of legalistic framework, which in some sense is probably necessary for us to reduce the suffering of animals.

So if we want to include an understanding of how human beings are going to choose to do something, some sense of legal rights is important, and legal rights are rooted in our cultural understanding of them, and hence our cultural understanding then can be informed by the compassion that we feel.

Because I think the other way of looking at it, when you say to reduce suffering, is to develop our compassion, our understanding of compassion.

And I don't think that the two are opposed to each other, they may just be different parts of the same process of us arriving at the point where we can in fact effectively honor the other lives and reduce their suffering.

Let me say a couple of things in response to that, and my comments pick up different parts of it.

The idea of rights as inherently political I think of as a little different from the idea that they always have to be installed in law, in a legalistic framework.

One way of looking at the animal rights movement over recent decades is to say that we want to do better in this area, and a concept that has been treated, I think, in valuable ways as a creature to improve human life and human societies, the idea of a right, can be exported into this other domain and we can just say that, look, animals have a right not to be treated as badly as they have been. Even if it's not legalistically understood, it's a way of exporting a useful concept that has a home in human political, social, legal life.

And I think that's often fine, and now I'll jump ahead to a different idea. In the second last chapter, one of the things I grapple with and found quite hard to think about is our proper response to suffering in wild nature, in wild systems, the suffering that results from the ordinary actions of predators, just the sorts of things that happen to wild animals.

And some philosophers have argued for, or taken seriously, the idea that we should if we can. I mean, very hard to do it in practical ways, but ideally we might try to intervene and reduce suffering in wild nature. Jeff McMahon, Martha Nussbaum in different ways have taken this idea seriously, for example. And I don't go down that road.

Now I don't go down that road because I reflect on the rights that they do and don't have. You know, do animals have the right not to suffer? If they do, do they have the right not to suffer at the hands of other animals? Do the other animals have a right to pursue their predatory instincts and so on?

Using the notion of right in that discussion is one way of proceeding, trying to sort through and work out where the rights are, who has them and who doesn't.

And I didn't go down that road, partly again because I think of rights as tools for dealing with problems in political and social and ethical life. And this problem, I think, is probably better handled with different concepts.

Now I'm not sure what those better concepts are. The way I put it in the book at one point is that we should take seriously the kinship we have with non-human wild animals and also feel a kind of gratitude to the evolutionary process that gave rise to us. And that should affect how we treat those animals.

Now that reflection, somewhat vague and difficult as it was, it's not really a rights-based train of thought at all. It's a different kind of thing.

Yeah, so that I think gives me a better response to your question, the idea that in some settings when we're dealing with these problems, bringing in the concept of a right I think is useful. In other contexts I think it's perhaps not the most useful way to approach them.

FR: And also, you know, really when you talk about kinship, I think, I mean I can't but help but put that within the context of how human beings actually did think about our relationship with the rest of the world for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it's still the way that many indigenous cultures think of.

You know, here the tribes, Native tribes in the American continent, talk about "all our relations" when they're speaking of the rest of the living beings on Earth.

So that it actually goes back to our ancient way of thinking about this and one that, you know, did not bring us to the brink of extinction like the current one is doing.

PGS: Yes, I do endorse that line of thought. I didn't make much of it in this book.

One thing I was very wary of, very conscious of, is I don't think that people should cherry pick aspects of Indigenous belief systems and just bring them into a discussion that has quite a different character and say, well, you know, look, here's a point of commonality with this particular Indigenous belief system.

And here in Australia, the Australian context is full of ideas that are suggestive on this front and the idea of kinship is definitely one of them. But it really does come as a package, it comes as a big package of ideas, and the cherry picking instinct is one that I wanted to resist. So while I resonate to the idea, I didn't make it part of the argument of the book.

FR: So let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to the whole notion of looking at life from the point of view of life as cause. And you actually start really with the beginning.
You start with cyanobacteria. I mean, we don't have the time to go through all the wonderful natural history that is in this book, Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey Smith. But this was such a striking one. Cyanobacteria, probably as far back as we can go in the chain of life, completely changing our planet.

PGS: Right. It's a wonderful part of the story, the fact that not only has the transformation of the planet by organisms been such a long-standing process that goes back so far, but also perhaps one of the handful of most massive transforming agents was this early case, these early episodes involving cyanobacteria.

They began filling the atmosphere with oxygen gas, which made possible animal life.

But also, and this is something that was one of the pleasures of writing this book and one of the challenges, was learning some earth science and realizing just the magnitude of these causal factors.

It's not just that oxygen in the atmosphere changes the viability of animals, makes it possible to live like us with nerves and muscles and brains, it changes the whole geology of the planet. You get different kinds of minerals appearing, you get different kinds of cycles with respect to all the other elements that are moving through the system.

But the earth becomes a different place as a consequence of the filling of the atmosphere with this highly reactive, almost aggressively reactive gas. And that was the first big transformation. So as you say, part of the book is about that first massive series of transforming events.

And then a series of episodes that I also enjoyed learning more about were the effects of land plants, the effects of land plants on rivers, which in turn affect mountains, the whole shape of the land being affected by the actions of plants with their root systems, with the way that they shape the land.

FR: I'm glad that you brought in plants there because this book, while in many ways focuses more on animals, most of it does, plants are also involved. And I had to think of, I remember when I was talking with Amitav Ghosh about his book about the history of the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes, and he said that he thought that opium actually created the opium trade, much in the way that you talk about how life is a cause. He came to look upon it as some conscious being that actually created the need for this opium trade that, of course, had incredible effects on human history.

PGS: Yes, Michael Pollan, if I remember rightly, has written in similar ways about food plants, the idea that wheat, for example, is a kind of an agent and its choices, or quasi-choices, its strategies are affecting how we behave to its benefit and so on. I didn't pursue that line of thought in the book. I've always been a little bit skeptical about it without knowing completely why.

There is a sense in which various of these plants have done things that, in a way mediated by our choices and decisions, have led to them becoming vastly more widespread, achieving a kind of ecological dominance. And then the question is whether you should describe that in strongly strategic or choice-based terms, and with a certain amount of caution I came to think of that as going too far. If part of the point of the book is to give a history of choice, you want to be careful not to see choice in places where it's not really present or only metaphorically present. And the idea of plants manipulating us in those ways, again with some caution, I think is going too far.

FR: Yeah, that makes some sense to me. And also it makes some sense when you come to talking about the Gaia Theory. I mean this is a theory which has entranced me for decades. I want it to be true. I feel in some sense that it is true, but that's a feeling. So where that feeling comes from, it's certainly not based on evidence. So there are uses to that construct, but there also are limitations. Talk a little bit about that. And we're talking about the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock, right?

PGS: Yeah, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis also. Yeah, well in a way I come from it in the opposite, in a way that's the opposite of the way you approach it. I have always instinctively thought, no, this is going too far. I don't believe this. It's a bit fluffy.
It's extending certain concepts, the idea of an organism into places where those concepts don't belong. The whole earth contains a lot of organisms, but to say that it is an organism in its own right, I've always thought is excessive.

And then I began reading some of the more recent and careful and critical discussions of this idea, especially in the work of Tim Lenton, who I talk about in a bit of detail in the book. Also, Ford Doolittle, a biologist who has a book on this topic, a whole book on Gaia coming out later this year, and they press against my skepticism a little bit, especially Lenton. I mean, the argument of Tim Lenton is, yeah, perhaps Lovelock was going too far, Lovelock and Margulis were going too far when they said that you can think of the whole Earth as an organism.

But if you drop that idea completely, you still have to deal with the fact that there are lots of cycles and processes on the Earth that look surprisingly friendly to the continuation of living activity. All sorts of things you'd think could go in different directions tend to go in a direction that keeps factors like the temperature, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the amount of salt in the sea, which is a case I found interesting, all of those variables are kept within somewhat friendly ranges for life.

And Lenton's argument is, okay, right, perhaps the Earth is not an organism, that was going too far, but now give me a story about why all these cycles should be behaving in a fairly consistently life-friendly way. And that challenge I found quite hard to deal with in the book, and I think some of it is just luck, some of it just has to be regarded as luck.

And that's true even on his view. For example, before life gets going there has to be a decent amount of water on a planet. And Lenton says that a lot of the water was brought in on asteroids. That's why the Earth had a good amount of water early on. Now that's not something that can have a Gaia-like explanation. That has to be luck. The fact that water will be useful in the formation of life at a later stage can't call it into Earth, even on the most ambitious Gaia-like view.

And once we get used to some of these things being just a matter of luck, you can see perhaps we should just get used to that more generally. Lenton doesn't buy it, and I thank him a lot in the acknowledgments of the book, and engaging with him on this topic was always a very productive and challenging part of the process.

So I've always been a skeptic about Gaia, I've always thought it was going too far, and some people have pushed me in ways that give me pause, as they say.

FR: And so consciousness, first of all, I'd like to ask you to define it. What is consciousness? How widespread do you think it is in the world?

PGS: The word consciousness has acquired a broader meaning in these discussions than it used to have. And I used to resist this broadening, but I've given up resisting. It basically now refers to just the presence of feelings of any kind, of the fact that an organism or any other system, there's something it feels like to be that system.

So in these recent discussions, to say that a squid is conscious is just to say that it feels like something to be a squid. And as I say, I used to resist this way of talking, but it's just the way the discussion has gone.

So let's say the question is, which systems in the world are such that it feels like something to be those systems or those organisms? And I don't think it feels like something to be the whole earth. I think that even if you think that Gaia is, the earth is an organism, it's a further step to think of it as a conscious organism.

I don't think plants are conscious also, but I think it's very common, probably, in animal life. I think the list of conscious animals extends beyond our relatives, other primates, other mammals, extends beyond fish and birds into at least some invertebrates.

The cases that there's now a pretty good case for, a pretty good argument for, are octopuses and to some extent other cephalopods, crustaceans like lobsters and crabs, and insects in some ways. They used to be the real borderline cases, where there was not particularly good evidence, and now the general trend has been toward it being, I think, fairly likely that there's something it feels like, even to be an insect.

FR: Yeah, and there's been some recent work that implies that plants also have that kind of consciousness, that when you cut them, they recoil, they certainly create defensive substances. So it really just may be a fact of the limitation of our own scientific knowledge to acknowledge consciousness among plants.

PGS: I don't buy it, but I'm not sure. In the plant case, one of the things that's argued a little bit in this book, but also in the previous book, is that nervous systems are special.
Nervous systems, I think, really make a huge difference in this area, and plants don't have them. They have signaling systems, as you say. They have all sorts of ways of coordinating defenses, but you could have a system that had signaling systems and ways of coordinating defenses that was not conscious, I think.

I mean, various robots are also, I think, places to think about here. Now, plants are alive, unlike the robots, and there can be an argument that living activity itself makes a big difference here. I resist that to some extent. I think nervous systems are where the action is with respect to experience.

FR: So I usually don't do this, but I am jumping around because when you talk, it just brings up other points in the book, and this was one I particularly was interested in. Well, I was interested in just about everything, but this one really struck me, which is that you think that there are real limitations to artificial intelligence, to robots, that there are certain things robots can't and will never be able to do. Talk about that and why.

PGS: I think that systems that are made in the way that present-day computers are made and the controllers in robots, to the extent that they use ordinary computer hardware as the controllers, it's not that I think they can't be very complicated and smart and have a kind of intelligence, but I think experience or consciousness, sentience, I think there's probably a real gap there.

And this follows again from the special features of nervous systems. If you look at a brain or another nervous system, the way we're used to thinking about it in a lot of these discussions is that, well, it's a big network. You've got things that switch on and off, other things, this neuron fires, it makes that neuron fire.

It's a big network and networks can exist in computers as well. And you could have a very similar structure inside a computer to what is in a person's brain.

Now, I think that line of thinking ignores some important features of nervous systems and brains, as well as the sort of networky, somewhat computer-like activities in brains.
There are what can be called the large-scale dynamic patterns, the rhythmic oscillations that extend over the whole system, and are not reducible to just those point-to-point influences. They're really a distinctive feature of brains that has been underplayed.

Now, some neuroscientists for decades, including Francis Crick of DNA fame, Wolfsinger, some other important neuroscientists, have long suspected that felt experience or consciousness has a connection to those oscillatory large-scale patterns that are distinctive to nervous systems, and I pretty much endorse that idea. No one knows for sure, I could be wrong, everyone pronouncing on this question could be wrong, but that's where I put my bets.

And present-day computer hardware is very different, it's just physically different. It's a physically different sort of object from a brain.

Now we could perhaps one day design different computer hardware that was very brain-like, that had the same kind of mixture of the network features and those large-scale rhythmic oscillations with the two interacting. We might build something like that.

I talk about this at one point in the book, I was talking at a conference a year or so ago and I was talking about exactly what we're discussing now, and I found myself saying, well, this is an invitation to people to design different hardware, different sorts of objects, and have computers physically different from how they are now.

And I woke up the next morning after this talk and I thought, well, is that really such a good idea? If there's a sort of a barrier there between computers as they are and consciousness or felt experience, maybe that's not a bad thing, that barrier, and maybe it's not a barrier that we should be rushing to break down.

Especially because if we start building simple, well, not simple, but simpler than human systems that we have reason to believe are sentient or conscious, we've then got to start worry about what their lives are like, and it's reasonable to suspect that at certain stages the ones we build might not have a good time at all. It might be quite a cruel practice that we find ourselves engaged in.

So I ended up thinking that if there's a barrier between the I side of AI, the intelligence side of AI, and consciousness, and that barrier is a matter of the hardware, the physical machines, maybe that's not a bad thing, that barrier.

FR: I couldn't agree more, and that actually brings us back to where we began in this conversation, and that is to factory farming, how we treat other animals. You say that you want to motivate and end to factory farming, and you use the idea of a life worth living and something called the reincarnation test.
Talk about that.

PGS: Yeah. I think that factory farming is pretty much the worst thing that humans do, at least to non-humans. There's plenty of bad things we do to other humans, but in the non-human realm, this is the biggest problem, and quite a few moral theories, philosophical approaches have come to converge or agree on this, but I'm not entirely happy with the way that existing discussions are set up, so I approach it again from scratch and think that a life worth living, that's a useful idea, and we should ask whether it's appropriate for us with our powers to give large numbers of animals a life that's not worth living, a life so bad that it would have been better not to have lived at all.

Now I don't think all farming is like that, but I think modern industrialised farming, especially of pigs and chickens, those are perhaps the two really conspicuous cases, I think it is like that. I think the lives are not worth living.

I think that if you just read a sort of sketch of what those lives are typically like, just a page-long sketch or something like that, and then you ask yourself, after I die, would I rather come back and live a life like that, or just have things end, not come back at all?

I think of that as a way of asking about the difference between a life worth living and a life not worth living. And if you think you'd rather not come back at all, that's a way of judging that these lives, these other animals' lives, are not worth living. And I certainly wouldn't want to come back as an animal living within an intensive modern factory farming context.

I wouldn't mind coming back as an animal on a really good humane farm. I think that's a very different case.

I'm not really an anti-farming person, but I think that the drive for profit, the fact that the numbers of animals have become so huge and control has become so mechanized has led to an imposition on them of a really, in many cases, the kinds of lives that we with our powers should not be imposing on anything.

FR: Yes, and whether it's a right or not, really what you're arguing is that we develop that compassion, that sense of compassion is about putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and seeing how does that feel and feeling how they feel. And I think that's so important.

You make another point too when it comes to farming that is what you call humane farming.
And of course, we want to make sure that what's called humane is certified humane.
But you make a point that I've often made to people who say that we shouldn't eat animals at all, which is if we don't eat cows and pigs and chickens, many of them will disappear from the earth because people are not going to be raising herds and herds of cows as pets.

PGS: That's right. In a gentle way, I do want to criticize some of the campaigns that are mounted on this front where people say, you know, this is the life these animals should have. They should be carefree lives in the fields.

Now, if we move to a completely plant-based diet, a completely plant-based food system, it's not that there'll be large numbers of cows and pigs living carefree lives in the fields. It'll be the end of that kind of existence, that kind of animal life.

And you might think that's fine, and I know plenty of people who think, yes, right, it would be better if the kind of being that a domesticated cow or chicken is just no longer existed because there's no way of making that into a decent life.

I do think there are reasonable different responses here. And in the book, I take time to map out some approaches different to mine that I have respect for, and a kind of total abolitionism, just turning our back on farming and letting non-human animal life just go its own way. It is an attitude that I have respect for. I see the point of it.

I think that there's a first round of decision-making that we confront when thinking about modern factory farming where the answers are fairly clear. We should stop doing these things.

And then there are some harder questions. Do we want farm animals to exist at all? Is there any regime under which we can feel it's justified? If we turn our back on them, should we then worry about the fact that the remnants might have quite difficult lives?

If we rewild the descendants of farm animals, should we worry about the fact that they may suffer in wild nature in ways that were preventable by us if we'd done things differently?

The general picture here is one in which I organize it around these two rounds of decision-making. We first got to think about modern industrialized farming, and I think change what we do.

First of all, I think there are lots of disagreements where I have a lot of respect for different views, and the consideration you raise about a future without, at all, various animals of these kinds, it's part of this second round of questioning.

FR: Right, and then you also move to the question of wildlife and habitat. I found it interesting, you say the two great environmental crises that we face are climate chaos, climate change, climate disruption, and habitat loss for wildlife, and that the latter has not been sufficiently examined or, you know, sufficiently promoted.

Now, clearly climate is a threat to habitat, but if we stopped all fossil fuel use tomorrow, we would still be destroying habitats because of the way our society works, our economies work. So talk about habitat disruption and how that fits into, you know, the larger goal of the book, which is to make us understand what our place is in the world in relationship to all the other living beings that we live on it with.

PGS: Right. In relation to those two crises that you mentioned, climate change and habitat destruction, I do want to argue for a partial reweighting of our priorities here.

It's not that I think that climate change isn't a big problem, but it has been allowed to completely dominate discussion in a lot of areas in a way that has nudged out or edged out concern over habitat destruction.

And people sometimes say, well, that's because, you know, if we don't do better on climate, then the habitats will be wrecked. And one thing I want to do is assert more of a separation between the two.

As you say, we could in principle do much better on climate, but continue to pollute, continue to let forests get cut down, continue to see animals such as birds and insects lose colossal numbers over a relatively short period of time. There's that possibility.

We could also, in principle, put less effort into climate change and put enormous effort into habitat preservation and restoration. We could try to construct or, you know, create really large reserves through which the effects of climate change could at least be blunted a bit because animals could move around, could find different places and so on.

Now it's not that I think we should do the second. I think that climate change should remain a priority. But I do think they're separable questions or separable problems. Probably the features of a climate change discussion that I most wanted to sort of press on in a somewhat unorthodox way, well, there are two.

There are two aspects of contemporary discussion of the climate crisis that I do want to push back on a little bit, and there are two ways in which my view is a bit unorthodox. One is this separation between the problems.

I think we should take habitat destruction more seriously in its own right. I mean, one thing it's worth reflecting on there is the fact that local action, local decisions are very efficacious in the case of habitat preservation.

If one state, one country, one region decides to preserve what it has, that need not be washed out by the failures of others elsewhere.

So one is the separation.

FR: And just to interject, that puts me in mind of the whole movement that I'm part of and that is really growing, which is people developing pollinator gardens on their own land and in their communities.

JBS: Right. Right. So it's a paradigm case of something which is extremely local, but efficacious because pollination is so important.

The other thing that I want to push back on a little bit in this discussion is the kind of doomsday language that's used, the way in which people now paint really grim pictures of the future, global boiling and uninhabitable earth and things like that.

And I push back a bit on that because I think it's not entirely accurate. If you go back in the history of the earth to a time when, for example, the earth was 5 degrees Celsius warmer than now, you don't reach some nightmare hellscape.

You reach a place that's warmer, but it's a place where, for example, the great apes were diverging from other primates. You reach a different stage in the dynamic earth. It's not, I think, inherently worse.

The problem of our present situation is the speed of change, the fact that adaptation is going to be so difficult given how fast things are changing. And I don't want to downplay the size of that problem, but both the separation of climate change from habitat preservation and, I think, the unwise way in which doomsday language is used. Those are two things where I do want to push a little against orthodoxy.

FR: Well, this has been just an amazing discussion, like your book. It's a book that really I want to reread a number of times because it really brings a different perspective, I think, when we are looking through the lens of how we act upon the world. It puts us in a place that allows us to take on a much more appropriate responsibility for it.

PGS: Well, this was a very challenging and enjoyable conversation, so thank you for having me on.