76: LAB GIRL, The Story of More, Price of Progress by Hope Jahren University of Oslo

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It's my pleasure to welcome Hope Jaron. She is an internationally award winning and acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo, Norway. I've been there twice, by the way. Known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forest dating back millions of years. She has won many prestigious awards in the field including the James B. McIlwain Medal of the American Geophysical Union. She's number one best selling author of Lab Girl and her most recent book, the Story of How We Got to Climate Change and Where We Go From Here. Hope, welcome. How are you?

I'm just fine. How are you doing?

Crazy times we're living in. And of course I'm referring to Covid. We don't know when anybody will be listening to this episode necessarily. It might be years from now. But just give us a little flavor as to what's going on in Norway with the coronavirus pandemic.

Well, it's maybe not too different from what a lot of your listeners are doing in that I'm home every day, I'm working from home. We go out and we buy food and we go to the pharmacy. But we're really encouraged to go out as little as possible and certainly not to mix, you know, in a personal way. And that's been in effect now 10 days. I'm 10 days into that. And we're not expecting to get the all clear for of course, I don't have any idea what the rules are going to be. But the kids are home, the parents are home, the workers are home and.

We'Re sitting tight and the economy has come to a grinding halt. And we're going to talk about that. Relating to the story of more, I think that's a pretty good segue. But I got to ask you, is yours a government order or is it a suggestion?

It's a suggestion and it's a suggestion that people are following very closely. The thing to remember about Norway really is that it's a country of 5 million people. So it's a country with a population the size of Atlanta. So organizing that many people, getting them on board, having their co workers, you know, all my co workers are doing the same thing. A lot of us work for the schools or other, you know, centrally governed workplaces. And so it's A recommendation. But the spirit is to follow that recommendation pretty closely.

I would think that in Norway or any of the Scandinavian countries have been to a mall that people would just listen without much debate. I can totally see that. Okay, well, so this is interesting because one of the ways, of course, people have been judging what's going on in China is by simply looking at the smog levels. And that's an indicator of how active the economy is. And tell us about the thesis of your recent book or your latest book, the Story of more. Have we all just gone crazy with consumption or what's going on in the world?

Well, there was a period of time where we were awfully, awfully good at making things. And my thesis is sort of that instead of taking all that imagination and going on to the next step of making things, we simply made more and more and more and more of what we could make. And we figured out better and better ways to get people to buy that more and more. So we've kind of edged ourselves into a corner where we know how to make things very well, but we're sort of to trying, trapped in having to consume more than we need to consume almost just to get rid of all these products.

Tell us what you mean by that. Is it like the issue of, okay, we've got all this junk, now we got to go to the Container Store to figure out how to store it and organize it? What do you mean?

I like that. That's kind of having more stuff means you have to have still more stuff. That's sort of what you said. And that's. That's very nose on. One great example is grain. So the population has doubled since I've been alive in the last 50 years. And that was a crisis. A crisis around. How are we going to feed all these people? That's a lot. Seven billion people is an awful lot of people.

But on balance, I do want to note that Mr. Malthus, Malthusian economics fame, said that in 1798 too. And apparently we got past that hurdle. Just on balance, I want to say that. Go ahead.

Oh, yeah, and the book goes through that too. I mean, people have been worried about population growth ever since they could count each other in mesopotamia, you know, 2,000 years before Christ. People were talking about, can the earth take, you know.

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

That's something that every single generation wrestles with. But the really kind of magical thing that happened about 50 years ago was that our plant scientists, our agricultural scientists, working with our farmers and our ag stations came up with a way to grow several times more food on the same plot of land.

As much as I love to hate this company, is Monsanto largely behind that?

It's a part of it, but it's really kind of the end of the story to make a bushel of corn, for example. And a bushel is about what it sounds like. It's about a 50 pound basket, about like what you check into the airport now to grow a bushel of corn. 50 years ago that used to take a field the size of about a basketball court. Today it takes just a little over a parking space to make that much grain. So we have been doing this wonderful, wonderful thing and we do it in three ways. And part of it is the improved breeds that now Monsanto has, has more or less of a monopoly on selling these very improved breeds. But it also comes from better herbicides and better pesticides, better irrigation.

We've also got Roundup, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's cancer causing Roundup, by the way. Yeah, go ahead.

Yes, yes, absolutely. So we ended up with double the population growth and triple the food supply. Now that was an amazing, you know, an amazing way to sort of solve this problem. But then the question became, what are we going to do with all this food? Corn is this great example because it's found new. We're actually hard pressed to consume all this stuff we make. We take part of the corn and we turn it into fuel. We take food, edible food, and we turn it into fuel for cars, right? And we take it and we turn it into flat out sugar. We put it in Coca Cola. We basically take all the nutrients out of it and turn it into just plain sugar. And then that goes into everything. Corn syrup goes into your ketchup, your salad dressing, your sodas, your. Yeah, so we're kind of, we created all this more and now we're desperately trying to find ways to consume it. And of course that's driving vast overconsumption, most of which is just not doing us any good or is doing us active harm. So the big question, the way I see it is can we learn to live with less? Can we learn to invent other things and invest in those that will help us not do more, but actually do less? It's kind of a different mindset and it takes a while to wrap your mind around, actually.

Okay, okay. So, well, you talked about the food part of it, and I was going to say only half jokingly, sadly, is that Americans have figured it out. They just store more food in their bodies and so we have a massive problem, pardon the pun, obesity epidemic, a massive one. But you know, with sugar, it's. There are obviously distinctions to that, but what do you. I mean, you're talking about every kind of material, every widget of every kind, food just being one of many.

Right, right. So we consume three times the number of fossil fuels that we did 50 years ago. We consume 10 times the amount of plastic. We consume 14 times the amount of seaweed, if you can believe that.

I love seaweed, Sal. Eat it all the time.

Only about 10% do you eat. 90% of the seaweed that gets harvested ends up in things like shampoo and hand lotion, cosmetics and processed vegan foods. Right. Because you need a substitute for eggs and mayonnaise and things like that. And so we are turning food into chemicals and then turning those chemicals into ourselves. And our health indices are decreasing and the toll on the earth is as great or bigger and bigger every year.

Is there anything we're using less of or doing better at or, you know, it's easy to say, okay, well, you know, bad, bad people over consuming and pillaging. But are we using less of anything? I mean, we're using more plastic and more this and that, but anything less.

Well, that's a big point, is that we aren't bad people, you know, and a lot of this snuck in on us when we didn't realize it was happening. You know, if you think about the after school snack you had when you were a kid versus now, and how much plastic you have to open up in order to do the one versus the other, a lot of these things didn't seem like big changes in our lives. And we certainly didn't go to the grocery store and say, I'm picking that because I don't care about anything and I want to wreck everything. But we did sort of trap ourselves into a system where plastic packaged products were kind of all that we could buy. What we're doing right now, and this has been really interesting, and it's certainly something I didn't expect when I was writing this book, is we're having this kind of interesting. And also, of course, people are ill and dying, and so it's not at all positive, but. But at the end of it all, we hope and pray that we'll go back to a new normal. And then we can have some interesting discussions about how much of all that stuff that we did was actually optional. How much of this traveling around, meeting face to face, eating out in restaurants, you know, burning gas in our car to get there. How. How much of it was. Was optional.

A lot of it is just sort of like laziness in a way. Well, I mean, I don't want to say it's lazy to travel because that takes kind of a lot of. But we sort of just go along with what we're being sold by Madison Avenue or now it's social media and keeping up with the Joneses and, you know, people. I think human nature's always been that way, but it seems as though we've had this explosion of it. Right. Maybe because we're just more connected and disconnected than ever at the same time. And, you know, maybe psychologically, like, we're all looking to fill a void, but we're all connected so we see what everybody else is doing. That's the keeping up with the Joneses concept. And then, of course, we get constant bombardment of media and, you know, it's maybe not a very mindful way to live. Is that what you're saying?

I think you hit the nail on the head. It's wonderful to talk to somebody who says what you just said. It really is, you know, and we know that we have to. We have to have a job, we have to have a paycheck. We support our families. You know, we need a place to shelter and we need food to eat. But do we need all that 10 times over? And is it making us any happier? You know, just like you said, sometimes it seems like acquiring all these things is actually us trying to fill a hole with something, and it doesn't seem as if it's working. I mean, it's really hard to measure how happy people are. But there are international reports that have tried to do it, and, you know, they. They publish the happiest country in the world and all that sort of business. But when they look at.

And they'll say Denmark, but I don't know, I kind of take issue with. I was just in Denmark several months ago and I'm not so sure, but go ahead.

Yeah, if you like spicy food, you're not going to be very happy there.

People have the ability to be happy everywhere. But in general terms, you know, if you look across, particularly the last 10 years in America, people are saying very adamantly that they're not as happy as they used to be, even though all this consumption is still going up even over 10 years ago. And so that leads me to believe that they're not linked. There isn't some amount of extra plastic doodads we can buy that's going to fill that particular Hole.

This is what economists call the law of diminishing marginal returns. And I think that's to put it in economic parallel. That's what we're talking about. All this stuff makes you happy to a point, and then it actually becomes a bond burden after that, or it makes you less happy, or maybe just being on the treadmill makes you less happy. I'm not sure I get the idea. I'm not saying I figured it out, but do you want to elaborate on that?

Well, I'm really excited about the last third of my book, which is really about making small changes that might turn into big changes. Just considering, you know, the way we consume and the way we eat and all these things, they're actually just 100 little choices that you make over the course of the day, and you make them yourself. You know, we have quite a bit of agency as consumers, and as, you know, we have some, you know, we're constricted in some ways, but there's, there's sort of a guide of, you know, if you wanted to use less energy, which of the items in your house uses the most? You know, even when I meet people that say, well, I'd like to cut down on my energy use or my footprint or whatever, what's the best way to do it? How do you get the most bang for your buck? Is it by turning all your lights off when you leave the house? Is it by this or that? Well, it turns out that a lot of it goes back to your hot water heater. You can use a smaller one or keep that water just a little cooler. That's where you're going to save money and save energy. And you can do it for a lot of reasons. You know, it can be a household, a household project. And if some folks are doing it to save a few dollars on the electric bill, that's just fine. If other folks are doing it because they're part of the Greta generation that wants to, you know, save the world from climate and disaster, well, that's just fine, too. I think that thinking about these things and thinking about what we can do as individuals, starting with small and getting bigger and bigger as we go, I think that's a way to start to talk about it.

Okay. But no one's going to get too excited about turning down their water heater. I mean, there's gotta be some bigger things here that are. I mean, I'm looking at your table of contents, right? So, gosh, I don't know where I should go in here, but, you know, I think the food thing is one that, you know, if you look at the COVID thing, for example, right. And you mentioned in Norway, people are cooperating pretty well, and in the US people are cooperating. You know, it's a big country, okay, 327 million people, but there are these outliers. Idiots. Right? But by and large, or now the new term is covidiot, okay? The new slang, okay, for people who infect other people or, you know, go and spy all the toilet paper so there's none left for anybody else. Right. You know, but by and large, people are cooperating. But, you know, maybe it's not because it's just sort of the right thing to do. It's because they have their own health at stake. You know, it's like maybe they don't care if they pass it to anybody else, but they care about themselves. So I think food is a big. A big one. That's kind of like an easy fix too, because it's for you. You can be selfish and think about, okay, well, I want to eat better because it's good for me. And if it has a side effect of being good for the environment, great. The real motivation will be for looking in the mirror and feeling better and having more energy and all that kind of stuff. So maybe you want to address some of the food stuff.

Yeah, Meat is a real. It's like these things. It's like, does your light bulb matter more than your hot water heater? No, it doesn't.

And the light bulb doesn't take much energy anymore, thanks to human ingenuity and LED lighting. Right.

Hardly any. It's your ac, it's your furnace. And also with your diet, you know, meat is your big. Is your big lever right there. What I try to encourage people to think about is it's not an all or nothing thing. You don't have to choose to be, you know, a vegan or an omnivore or, you know, it's not that the difference between seven servings of meat a week and five servings of meat a week is huge in terms of.

It's huge for your health, too.

Absolutely. Right. So it's not about joining one of these clubs and picking up the torch. It can be about one meatless day a week. Adds up to a massive amount of food left over for somebody else.

Let me share a couple thoughts on that, if I may. And I, you know, we talked off air about them when I was in my 20s, I was a not too strict vegetarian for six years, and then I came off of it. And I actually felt better eating some meat. But I think by far, at least, Americans consume way too much meat. And I'm. I'm, you know, I'm not omnivore. I think we're meant to be omnivores. But meat should be this celebration concept. Think about it. If we were all living in caves. Hunting is a hard chore that's difficult to hunt and catch an animal. They're fast, okay? And so that was the rarity. And, you know, maybe the whole village got together and had a celebration when there was a kill and they ate the animal. But it wasn't three meals a day. We were. I don't think the body was designed to consume that much animal product. And of course, it's better for the environment. You know, I remember I interviewed John Robbins son on the show, but years ago, I followed John Robbins work and I'd go see him speak. And he wrote Diet for a New America. Great book. He talked about the number of gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of edible fruit, vegetables or meat. And the meat is just. It's insane. It's so inefficient to feed an animal vegetables and then slaughter the animal and eat the animal. You know, you could just eat the vegetables, and it's just a much more efficient thing. Eating low on the food chain, it's so much. It's better for the planet. It's just better for everything. So, you know what I would say to people is just eat meat once a day. This whole concept of, like, oh, we need all this protein, I kind of fell for that for a while, too. Protein is a big molecule. It doesn't circulate in your body very well. And if you overdose yourself on protein because you're trying to bulk up or whatever, you know, you need protein. It's the building block of your muscles, sure, but too much of it is counterproductive. It'll make you get cancer. It slows down your circulation.

And what I try to emphasize to people is it's not that we're on the heavy end of meat eating. It's that we're way past the heavy end of meat eating. So back in the wartime recommendation back World War II, when they tried to get folks to cut down on things for the war effort, they advised about 3.5 pounds of meat per family per week as a perfectly healthy way to go. And there were lots of families that were able to adhere to that. Today we live in a society where we've got an awful lot of folks eating about 3.5 pounds, or nearly that per day in terms of animal products. Right. So we're past being omnivores. I mean, we're really, really very much off the charts with this sort of thing. And it's not, as you say, it's not doing us any good. And we're getting to the point where we need to think about why, why are we doing this, how did we get this way, and do we need it to go forward? The other thing we do is we throw away about 40% of the edible food we prepare.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's terrible.

So in order to keep the food, we just make so terribly much food. In order to keep that wheel turning, we have to. We can't even possibly stuff it down ourselves.

And it's not like we're not trying. Right? We have to. Actually, the amount of food that's edible that we throw away in the first world is enough to feed everyone who's undernourished on the planet. There's about a million undernourished people, and the amount of food that gets thrown away is equal to what would bring them up to a mark of nourishment. So we live on a planet that all the suffering that we see is because of our inability to share, not the Earth's inability to produce. And I remember when. When I figured that out from lots and lots of numbers and crunching lots and lots of data, that that's true with respect to energy and it's true with respect to food. And it kind of puts us at a crossroads. Are we just going to keep going toward the more until, you know, almost. Do you remember that Monty Python movie where that guy literally blew up?

I think that sometimes, you know, is that. Where could it possibly end?

Yeah, it's quite something. It really is. Any comment on sugar and the different types of sugar and, you know, anything like that, Anything more you want to say there?

Sugar is interesting in that it's very, very cheap to make and it's very easy to put into food, and.

It'S driven the sales of certain things. When we figured out how to make corn into sugar, it was as a syrup, and it was very, very easy to get it to go into liquid form. Much easier than the sugar we had before that. And that's when we saw the explosion of soft drinks and 2 liters for 99 cents, and it became available. It became everywhere, and it became kind of the default drink. And there was about, you know, now soda consumption is starting to go down a Little bit. But I think what would we have without having all the sugar and everything? You know, it's. And the sugar, these sugar compounds were literally invented in the 1970s. It's something we hadn't known before. So we've got all this great technology, these great ideas, these great investments, but it seems like we've put them to some unfortunate uses. Do you agree with that?

Yes, I do. And I think one guideline should be to simply look at the way nature operates. Like the example I gave of eating animal products. Animal products are not easy to get in nature. Animals are fast, they're hard to catch. Okay? We've gotten good at it in the modern era because we've got all sorts of tools to take advantage of the animals. Right. Which is sad. But sugar is also hard to get in nature. And we should eat and consume proportionate to how hard something is to get in a natural way. You know, as much as I'm definitely not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, I do like something he said that he eats animal products, but only what, he kills himself. So he doesn't do that very often, I'm guessing at Facebook headquarters.

So, you know, some of us would be hopeless at that. But.

I had a friend that could do that. And then maybe I could make preserves out of cherries from my tree. We could have a good trade going on.

No, I just think, look at, I mean, listen, I think the environmental movement is largely an over politicized and I think science sadly has been over politicized to fit an agenda. I don't like any of that, okay? I don't agree with a lot of the sort of environmental movement, if you will, that's become this political element. But I do agree with just being sensible and doing it for your own health. I mean, this is just logical, okay?

It's not like you have to become a zealot of anything, right? These are just reasonable, logical things. Okay?

I think you're exactly right. I mean, there's a great example of that and that, that's the global warming. And that was a label that was thrown out, was thrown out by scientists who knew that the earth's atmosphere was changing and heat balance was going to change. Global warming was a very, very simple way to simplify that. And it was put out as a buzzword under the assumption that the public couldn't understand anything more complex than that. It was disrespectful and it was kind of taken the easy way out. What we're seeing now is these weird freezes and These intense storms and strange blizzards. And what it is is that yeah, the atmosphere warmed, but it warmed in these pockets. And these pockets get pushed around in weird ways. Like you've heard from your weatherman, you know, a low pressure, a high pressure, a low pressure thing is moving in and all this kind of stuff. And what that warming did, was it get everything churning around again faster. Well, that takes a little more time to explain and you've got to have a little more respect that people are going to.

But we now have this weather weirding I call it, which is the result of that moving around air faster and in different ways than we've seen before. But we don't have straight on warming, which they took the easy way out as making the suggestion. And it eroded a lot of trust and it became very political and a lot of people wanted to be on their soapboxes and look smart and all that kind of business. And I mean, I agree with you 100%. I guess this is why I don't, you know, this is why I'm not a member of the ipcc. I don't get asked to join those kind of clubs because we, we as scientists, we need to, to really talk to people instead of preach at them. And that's, that's another thing that I'm really quite proud that this book does well. It talks to people with a level of respect, understanding and hope that they'll find something interesting in there for them.

Well, good stuff. Give out your website.

It is the storyofmore.com will take you to everything you need to know about me and the book and the other books.

All right, great. That's the storyofmoore.com and hope. Thank you so much for joining us.

You're welcome. Thanks again.

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