Population: A Threat Multiplier for Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, & Pandemics
In this interview with Dr. Camilo Mora, widely acclaimed professor and award-winning researcher, we discuss the impacts of human activity on climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and pandemics, and how to move past population denial to grapple with our compounding crises. Dr. Mora shares his firsthand experience of the direct impact of population pressures he has experienced in Colombia, including the loss of biodiversity, worsening of poverty, and the erasure of traditional cultural wisdom. He also talks about the pitfalls of setting up “protected areas” for biodiversity conservation in the Global South, and why population reduction is the most effective pathway forward for the wellbeing of people and the planet.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Camilo Mora 0:00
The more people there is, the more food you have to produce, the more food you produce, the more land you're gonna need, and the more houses you're gonna need. The land that is being used for us to have food and shelter is land that is being used by nature. So in that set of connections, biodiversity has been lost, but the planet already doesn't have enough resources to even feed the people that live on this planet. We look at the amount of energy that a human being requires to live within certain standards of living that require like about two hectares of land. So you take the simple mathematics - 8 billion people times two hectares, that gives you 16 billion hectares, and the planet has only 13 billion hectares. So it's creating the situation of overshooting. The fact that nearly a billion people go hungry today, and another billion go without water that tells you already the degree of scarcity of resources, and the fact that 20,000 species are going extinct every year. So it's kind of the fallacy of us thinking about sustainability, meaning that we can sustain all of that people. No, sustainability means that we're gonna sustain ourselves while maintaining a functional planet.
Alan Ware 1:03
That was Dr. Camilo Mora, widely acclaimed professor and award winning researcher who studies the relationships between human activity climate change and biodiversity patterns and seeks to identify how humans can harmoniously coexist with the natural world. We'll hear more from him on this episode of the overpopulation podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 1:31
Welcome to the overpopulation podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co host of the podcast and executive director of population balance.
Alan Ware 1:55
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy and ecological overshoot, and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. Today's guest, Dr. Camilo Mora is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Mora was raised in Columbia, earned his PhD in Biology from the University of Windsor, and has completed fellowships at the University of Auckland, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Dalhousie University. In his research lab, Mora is working to identify the optimal conditions for harmonious human existence with the natural world while creating a better understanding about how humans affect biodiversity patterns. His work is based primarily on how stressors such as climate change and land use are impacting biodiversity and causing feedback loops on human welfare. He is the author of over 70 scientific publications, three of which have been among the top 100 science stories in the world for multiple years. Eleven of his publications have appeared in the highly acclaimed journals Nature and Science. His work has been showcased on multiple occasions on the New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, CNN and conservative channels such as Fox News, and Breitbart, among many others. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 3:25
Good afternoon Camilo. We have been looking forward to this interview with you as you are not only a high profile biodiversity researcher, but also one of very few distinguished scientists willing to speak about human overpopulation and its impacts on the natural world. You normally spend much of your time in Hawaii teaching for most of the year. But we understand that classes are out. And you're joining us today from your family farm and your home where you grew up in Colombia today. Thank you for making the time during your summer break to speak with us. And welcome to our podcast.
Camilo Mora 4:01
Thank you very much for having me. Always a pleasure talking to you guys.
Nandita Bajaj 4:04
Why don't we start with a little background about your upbringing, you mentioned that you grew up in rural Colombia. Your family still lives in Colombia, and you spend a lot of time there. What changes have you seen in the areas where you grew up since you left and in Colombia in general over the past few decades?
Camilo Mora 4:24
Growing up in Colombia, and especially in the area that I grew up, so Colombia is divided between the rural area and cities like everywhere else around the world. So I grew up in the jungle side of the country and my country offered two perspectives to me. The first one is poverty, poverty and violence. We obviously are one of the top most violent countries in the entire world. When I was a child. I used to hear people getting killed by the hundreds. By the time that I was 15, I could have easily seen maybe 10-20 people dead. You know, one thing is for you to hear on the news. Another thing is for you to see it on the street. That kind of violence kind of brings things into perspective. That combined with poverty. And the other element for me was to grow up in a farm. So a couple of things have influenced me significantly. The first one is that I didn't want to be poor. And that is a perspective that has been lost when we talk about all of these things of overpopulation, biodiversity loss, and protected areas, because it's the people from the first world that is talking about this.
I went to do my PhD, I started digging into the data, learning all of these things. And you cannot expect a PhD from people in my country. You can barely expect them to finish high school or forget university. So it creates a whole reality that people in the first world need to understand if we are to fix these problems of biodiversity loss and overpopulation. I'm telling you it's just like two worlds, you know, and those are like movies. For people in the first world, when they look over here, they look like a movie, something that they just don't comprehend. But for you to be immersed on both those realities, it creates a whole different perspective. And especially when someone will talk about solutions, things that seem obvious for the people over there. For me, they are totally nonsense. And again, it's because of the fact that you need to be here to know what things are possible and which things are not.
So, for instance, when I talk about the environmental world, yeah, we have wiped out everything. It's just like nothing's standing here. My farm where I grew up, you can drive miles now I know what you see is just sugar cane. When I was a child, I remember us driving a car and having to stop for animals that we had never seen before crossing the street; or, for instance, getting home at night, every now and then we needed to stop the car to clear the lights because the amount of insects that we hit were just mind blowing. Nowadays, you can barely hit a mosquito driving a car, you know. And that just gives you a sense of the amount of loss that had happened there. The other thing that you see now, for instance, in the area that I grew up, there were only about 800 people in my community. You get to know everybody by name. Everybody knew the drama of everybody. Nowadays, we are maybe 14,000 people where I grew up. And not only that, or proximity to the city so much, but there is a huge turnover of people on the community. So that sense of community that we used to have before it's just gone already. But the level of knowledge of us as a community is gone, again, because this expansion of urbanization into rural areas kind of got to us.
That's on the negative side. But there has been a positive change, though. That positive change is woman empowerment. So if I look at my grandmother, for instance, my grandmother was a woman that stay in the house most of the time, she was kind of cared by her husband. But there has been a transition for the woman to have more power, you know. And just to give you an example. Here where I grew up, I now have a PhD, I can come and hire people and I hire all of my friends, the same people that I grew up with playing soccer on the street with no shoes, getting into fights every now and then, I hired them to come and help me on the farm. Because we're close friends since forever. Every Saturday I buy drinks, and one day we are sitting on hammocks thinking we are having a laugh, my sister stops by and say hello to me. And one of my friends who was a worker for me say Dr. Mora, referring to my sister, you know, like when you like. But I found it remarkable for both ends on the side of my sister to achieve the level but from the side of this guy was a male respecting the power of my sister. And that for me was, I felt pretty proud at that moment for both and for my sister for us to get there. But also for us as a society to respect the power of woman you know, by in my case, I have seen massive changes on woman empowerment. There have been roads, you know, like I say my community, all of my sisters went to university and all of them are driving cars and all of them have jobs and all of them are hiring males. And the males come and work, they are just working like for anybody else. But that's creating in the minds of other women that they can get there too. And they are also realizing that it's the children the one that attached them. I'm not saying don't have children. Have the children after you have fulfilled your aspirations in life and a lot of woman are perceiving this. So the amount of women that had had a lot of children in my community are very low. Some of them are not even having children you know and nobody has forcing, they're just choosing not to, and their partners, I don't know how he's in other countries, but males over here are very respectful of those choices at home. So, yeah, families are becoming smaller.
Nandita Bajaj 9:29
That's such a wonderful development to hear firsthand from you. And also the experience of women you know, once they do become empowered and want to find fulfillment in life have so many more choices to do that and that some women are just not having children at all because they are finding meaning and so many other areas in life and that's definitely a trend we've been noticing in many different countries where women become more educated and then have many more choices. So But what's also heartening to hear about your community is that people are accepting of that choice because not all countries are as accepting or welcoming of women choosing to have smaller families or or no children at all. Sometimes women get called selfish for not having kids. So that's a great development.
Camilo Mora 10:21
Oh, no, that's changing. People is now judging here, when you hear people having 3-4 children, you know, and you can hear the comments, even to their faces, like what's going on, there is no electricity. And that kind of reflects the fact that, yeah, people is judging these things. And I realized that, me as a father, the best that I can do for my child is to provide a degree of education and competitiveness, so that she can be successful in life, whatever she wants to do. And for that, you need to make a huge investment of money.
Nandita Bajaj 10:50
Yeah, when people are becoming empowered, it's not just that they can make better investments in their own life for finding greater fulfillment through many other creative endeavors, work, education, etc. But also that they can make better investments in the lives of their own children. And that sometimes is a privilege not everybody has access to because of lack of contraceptive availability, cultural norms that don't allow people to make family choices that are good for them.
Camilo Mora 11:22
Yeah, the question is, how do we get that message to people? And sometimes I think that we just gotta start finding different people to communicate this message. Because it could be just that, the fact that we don't have the right messenger for delivering these things. I mean, sometimes people like Leonardo DiCaprio, I find it mind blowing that people talk about climate change. And they recognize Leonardo DiCaprio as the guy on this, because you're like, are you freaking kidding me, this guy. I mean, he's pretty good and everything. But at the same time, I realized that he's the best messenger for this. Let me share this story with you. One day, I get an email from PLOS Biology, saying that I was the author of one of the top most cited papers on this magazine. It has been seen like half a million times, which is mind blowing for a scientific paper to have been seen half a million times. And I was super proud. I was early in the morning, I get to my classroom. And there are a lot of undergrads there. And I say to them, sorry, guys, I'm so excited to share this story with you. I just got this email back. My paper has been seen half a million times. And one student laugh. So I asked the student what's going on? Why do you laugh? And he say, No, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be disrespectful. I just don't know you are saying that as a good thing. It sounds like it because you're super excited. And I say What do you mean? Well, Justin Bieber last week put out a video, Despacito, that has been watched a billion times in a week and my paper baby has been seen a half a million times, and I'm celebrating. So this appreciation of this has really made me realize also the disparity in the extent to which important information is being transferred. And me. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, really, how naive we are as a scientists to think that the science that we're producing is having an impact on the overall society. Because there I was feeling super proud to have my paper being seen by half a million people, when we had 7 billion of us at the time.
I don't know, right now, that's what I am leaning towards the solution. And that is just for you to get a couple of people. You know, one celebrity and one good scientist coming together. Even after we have a celebrity for communication, I want the message to be legit. And, fortunately, you cannot undermine the amount of complexity and scientific background that goes into our comments. we cannot afford to be wrong on this. Time is running out for many species. Time ran out already. We are wiping our species like nobody's business. Over 20,000 species are going to extinction every year, because we are destroying over 6 million hectares of forests. Anytime that the solutions are proposed, I want it to be right from the start. And that will require a messenger, as we established, but also the correct message. The messenger, you need the celebrity, and for the correct message you need the science. You need to have those two things coming together. Hopefully that will make a difference.
Alan Ware 14:06
And you've done plenty of the science, as we've seen from your heavily cited articles like that half a million and others, many others that you've gotten the high profile recognition for. One of the ones that we were aware of for this podcast is some research you co-authored with two previous guests on the podcast, Robert Engelmann, and Eileen Crist, where you looked at population food production and biodiversity and how they're all related, something you've just told us about with the sugarcane, what you've seen, just in your lifetime, where you grew up - the obvious connection between population growth, food production for that population growth, and then biodiversity. What were the main findings of that academic research?
Camilo Mora 14:47
So there were a couple of findings from that, and I'm going to put it simply. Basically, we just discovered that the water is wet, so to speak, because those are things that should be obvious for everybody, right? That the more people there is, the more food you have to produce. The more food you produce, the more land you're gonna need and the more houses you're gonna need. The land that is being used for us to have food and shelter is land that is being used by nature. So, in that set of connections, biodiversity has been lost. So those are the findings that we found. But another analysis that kind of blew my mind from that study is that the planet already doesn't have enough resources to even feed the people that live in this planet. That, for me, it was mind blowing. Basically, what we did there, we look at the amount of energy that a human being requires to live within the certain standards of living and that requires like about two hectares of land. So everything was calculating the amount of energy required, that's two hectares per land per person per year. So you take a satellite image of the planet and calculate all the land that can be used for agriculture plus food that can be taken from the oceans, that gives you about 13 billion hectares of land that we can use. Okay, that's what is available. So if you take the simple mathematics, let's round the numbers to a billion people times two hectares, that gives you 16 billion hectares, and the planet has only 13. So it's creating this the situation of overshooting.
And the planet, so far, it's been in overshoot back in the 1980s, was when the population of the world could be sustained by the planet. That generation, my father's generation, was the last generation that had claim to be sustainable. After that, there were just too many people that no matter how you slice the resources that are on the planet, it's just not enough to give what every human being needs. But then you say, how is that happening? Well, a couple of things make that very obvious - the fact that nearly a billion people go hungry today, and another billion go without water that tells you already there that we have a scarcity of resources. And the other thing that tells you that this is becoming legit, is the fact that 20,000 species are going extinct every year, because the land that we need to sustain all of our people is being taken from biodiversity. So at the moment we can sustain ourselves. So it's kind of the fallacy of us thinking about sustainability as meaning that we can sustain all of the people. No, sustainability means that we're gonna sustain ourselves while maintaining a functional planet.
Alan Ware 16:59
Yeah, and I've heard you mention that, for food production, it would be good if we could reduce food waste, which I've heard for years, we need to reduce food waste, reduce food waste, and yet we hardly ever seem to really reduce food waste on a global level. And then changing food diets, which would be great. But that also seems like something that as people's incomes go up, as they enter the global middle class, they want meat and dairy. Right?
Camilo Mora 17:21
That is totally legit. I can tell you as we started this conversation, one of the things of me having grown in Colombia, the first thing was I didn't want to be poor, you know, and there was nothing that I saw on TV or anything but just basic human needs and needed to be fulfilled. And everybody wants this and everybody deserves this. As a person that grew up in third world and telling you no matter what kind of a science you bring to us, everybody wants to feed meat to their children. So the same thing goes with food waste, you know, the amount of food that is wasted. I mean, I presume publicity campaigns can make a difference. But after having been in the United States and Australia and New Zealand, I just realized that's just gonna be hardcore people. So personally, again, I see that as a reality. That brings me, how do we deal with this problem then? And what I am seeing is if we reduce family sizes, we have good investments on woman empowerment and affordable family planning, and all of these things that are already available, we don't have to have so many people, so that even with these realities in place, they will not be a significant effect. So that has been another learning experience for me is that all of these problems that we see come down to how many children we choose to have.
Nandita Bajaj 18:32
Yeah, but the work that we're doing, we are talking about both things, you know, we need to be cutting back our consumption in big ways, especially the really rich countries who are using, you know, two to three planets four planets worth of resources, and that we need to be scaling back our population. Both things need to be happening. But as you point out in this paper, too, is, as people's standard of living increases - we're expecting to add another billion people to the middle class globally, in this decade - we're actually seeing skyrocketing increase in consumption and meat and dairy as much as we advocate for a shift to a plant-based diet through our work. But as you say, the reality is different. As people become richer, they want the things that the rich world has had for so long. And another interesting thing you brought up, Camilo, is around the world, an increasingly popular and much needed strategy of nature conservation is the establishment of protected natural areas. But you've shown through your research, that many of these protected areas are actually not achieving the goals of protecting species populations, as well as biodiversity. Can you tell us a little bit more about what your findings show?
Camilo Mora 19:50
So unfortunately, what we have found is that a species, for them to survive, they need habitat. And those habitats need to be interconnected. You keep all of the species, all of the individuals of a species in a single place, the species itself will go extinct, the reason being inbreeding, creating some genetic changes that make alleles are negative to the species to become too common. That's what happens when you have populations that are small, all of them living in the same place and their daughters mating with their parents and things like that. That creates this burden of inbreeding. So we have come to learn that for you to sustain biodiversity you need area, you need land, and these land needs to be ideally in the same configuration that it has been naturally. So when we talk about protected areas, the idea is pretty simple. And that's why it has been so popular. Basically, the idea is we're gonna remove the human pressures on these places with the expectation that a species will increase in their abundance and body sizes. But when we went and looked at this, it's not happening. So in many cases, there are a couple things happening there. These are what are called technical and practical shortcomings. The technical shortcomings are that the protected areas are too small. So even if they are highly protected, but you have a species that had a large geographical range, this species can move outside this protected area and get killed outside. So the population has reduced despite the fact that you have a protected area. Some of the patches are so small and so isolated, that it leads to these problems of genetic changes that we just talked about there.
So, the technical problems are is that they are too few, they are too small, and they are too far apart. And those three things are a death sentence for the species that you want to maintain there. Now, there are also practical shortcomings. The practical shortcomings is the fact that you want to implement these places on the places that have the most biodiversity. And those are the tropical countries. And the reality of those many places is the fact that we are poor. So you take a satellite image of the planet and you will see how Northern Europe, Canada and the United States, it's like nothing there. Everything is green. And I'm telling you 400 years ago that was just the same forest cover that it is today in the tropics. What happened? Well, you guys cut down your trees, you produce your crops, and you had a good standard of living. Okay, so now we are the ones in the tropics holding the biodiversity, but people here is poor. So, and you want us to protect the land to protect biodiversity and to produce oxygen and to sequester the carbon and to hold water so that you can enjoy the way that you live in. So, see like that doesn't make any sense. Why do they want to do that sacrifice for you to live well? That creates a reality that now these solutions that come from the first world to be implemented in the third world. First of all, the disparity, the economic disparity, make these things just non-viable from the start, but in some cases, they have been implemented.
What happened though, is that imagine this picture. You are a fisherman that has five children, right? All of them are going hungry, and there is no fish where you fish because obviously the degree of overfishing to feed all of the people. It's crazy to get money from the World Bank, Bill Gates and they come and set up a protected area. And they bring people with machine guns to protect these areas so nobody goes and eats there while I have five of my kids going hungry. And all of these fish, on the side of this protected area, are just growing so big. I'm telling you, you can say whatever you want from these people, all they are being is human beings trying to feed their own. And what that does is to make people cross that boundary, kill the fish, make those protected areas non-effective. So, at the end of the day, we are trying to solve a problem with a solution that is just not viable in this place. You can get case examples, mostly in the developed world, in which the hard work and the hard work, obviously, because they have put a lot of money, but because the people that live around there don't need to go in there.
So those are just some of the examples of why I don't think protected areas are gonna work. I have written tens of papers on these documenting it's just not viable. Now, what is more mind blowing is the fact that, despite this popularity of protected areas, and you had obviously a lot of scientists, mostly from the first world, you know, and sometimes you say, but we're speaking on behalf of the world. And what happens is that you get so many scientists from there coming and living here and they claim these things from there. No, man, that doesn't make you us. Your mind set on a different year, that makes the things that you are saying not right for the people that live here. And despite all this, there have been a huge spike in the creation of these protected areas around the world. And, even with that, that's not enough. We are talking about one or 2% so far and we need like 50%. So we are already crying that there is not enough money to maintain these protected areas, yet we want to increase them by 10-20 fold. That is, for me, why I just don't believe on that as a solution. I'd rather take all that money, put it to work in programs of woman empowerment. And I think that we will have a much longer term effect on that, on biodiversity, than setting out these protected areas. Protected areas are just nonsense. Just like those places in India, where you see people living in misery on these houses, and then you see a guy having a mansion of seven buildings that are this contrast. You see what I'm talking about, like these billionaires that build these mansions in front of a lot of poor people. That's what a protected area is. Obviously you can do it, you can force your way into it. But eventually, over time, it's just not a viable solution.
Alan Ware 25:20
And we've read that it can be very hard to enforce the protected area, right? They usually are understaffed with Rangers that might be on bicycles, trying to guard this enormous piece of land.
Camilo Mora 25:32
It's expensive. I mean, there have been analyses on to this. I actually have papers on this. Unfortunately, I wrote them so long ago, I don't remember the exact numbers, but we have the mathematics on the cost. And basically, you will have to increase the investment many, many times. I don't have the numbers, but we did them exactly to your point, Alan, that the amount of money that we need is just insane. So again, it's a solution that in reality is just really not gonna work out.
Alan Ware 25:56
Well, that's good that you're letting people know that, because that seems like a very major push now - the 30 by 2030 and 'nature needs half' aren't those relying on protected areas?
Camilo Mora 26:07
We did an analysis. I remember taking a satellite map of the world where you have the people and you can get numbers. And basically what we did was to increase the protected areas and try to put them in places where there will not be enough people. So, if you were to take half the area that was requested the time, I think it was 20%, you will need to move people. Like 200 million people will have to be moved away from the places where they live. And that analysis is pretty old. This analysis was done many years ago. And it was only 20% of the land that we needed to put there. And I said, where are we going to put these 20%? And no matter how you slice it, the only places maybe will be the north and south pole where you can put that kind of land without having to take people out from where they live. So the degree of displacement that that will create will be insane.
Alan Ware 26:55
Yeah, that is difficult with the Global North, Global South. As you mentioned, a lot of the Global North has already destroyed so many of their biosystems. I'm here in Minnesota where 99% of the tallgrass prairie that was here, eventually is just gone. Now it's all corn and soybeans. So all of that nature preserve was yeah, it was very much taken. And now we're living on the production of all that great farmland, but it's also being degraded with the topsoil and the water is being polluted. And so yeah, it can be quite hypocritical for the Global North to tell the south you protect stuff down there for all of us after we've trashed the north. So speaking of some of your climate change work, you've done extensive work with all kinds of big studies on climate change, and a primary focus of your research has been on marine ecosystems with your doctorate on coral reefs, in particular, So what have you seen as the broader climate change impacts on marine ecosystems, if you could give us an overview.
Camilo Mora 27:57
Now my view of the problem has grown bigger. Actually, I've come to learn that if we want to save the oceans, we have to get out of the water, that to say that the solution is not even on the oceans, you know, the solutions are on land, we want to say this. But those earliest studies that you were talking about when we're looking at climate change, just to summarize, everybody thinks about heating, the oceans are getting hot, and a lot of species are not gonna be able to endure that degree of heat. Just like we don't survive today when you get heat waves on cities, species in the ocean are kind of dealing with the same drill there. And in the oceans it's even worse, because the temperature animals there, plants and all of the biodiversity, is not used to high increases in temperature. So these smaller increases in temperature are really having a toll on the biodiversity of the ocean. But the problem that I discover, again, my view is much bigger now on this, but let me summarize it this way. I say to my students, the species in the oceans dealing with climate change is like me getting into a fight with Mike Tyson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, all of the three of them at the same time, all three of them fighting against me. I'm not going to survive this. So it's the same situation for the species in the ocean, especially in the ocean and they're not gonna survive climate change. The amount of species that will survive are gonna be quite few.
Why is this? So, during El Nino events, we get temperature increasing the temperature and you'll see massive amount of bleaching now wiping out huge areas of the world corals, okay? Those are moments when the temperature increases by one or two degrees by maybe 2-3 months, four at most. With climate change, we are talking about five degrees of warming forever, okay? So, if we know they can barely survive El Nino that lasts only a few months and increases the temperature by only a couple degrees, when climate change comes their way it's gonna be twice the degree of heating forever. So that's the Mike Tyson, okay? Now you have Sylvester Stallone. This Sylvester Stallone in the ocean is oxygen. So unfortunately, with these changes in the ocean, we have found that the degree of oxygen in the ocean is reducing. That is because oxygen to get to the deepest parts of the ocean gets there via the interchange with the surface. So water that is hot doesn't incorporate the oxygen and it's changing the patterns of wind circulation as well. So we have something called dead zones. Dead zones are these places in the oceans, you can think of them like clouds that are increasing because oxygen is not being replaced there. So the amount of areas where there is oxygen below levels required to sustain biodiversity are increasing. And all of these species die.
I found on CNN today, I just saw a massive die-off of fish that showed up dead on a beach. I didn't read the article. But as I was reading that I was thinking one or two things. One is these red tides, which are microbes that are also increasingly in abundance because of the warming or dead zones which are huge patches of ocean that lack the oxygen and that's the Sylvester Stallone okay? Now you have the Arnold Swarzenegger. The Arnold Swarzenegger is food, the fact that the capacity of the oceans to produce food is also reducing, as well. You can imagine a species having to deal with those three things at the same time - warming at a moment with no oxygen and a moment with no food. That is again, like me getting into a fight with Mike Tyson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. I cannot survive one of them. The chances that I would survive fighting three of them are gonna be pretty rare. And what that will do is a massive process of selection in the oceans where you're going to have very few species able to survive a fight against those three things.
Alan Ware 31:33
So how do you feel the future bodes for the oceans? Are we looking at simpler life forms? I've heard the talk of jellyfish and just not as many levels of different species?
Camilo Mora 31:45
Yeah, I mean, you can see that already. You can go to places like Cancun and what you see there. When I was doing my PhD I recall going there and there were fish there and there were beautiful corals. All the Yucatan Peninsula was like that. Now, with the degree of development and human encroachment on those places, I had the opportunity of going there recently and there is just nothing there. All what you see is algae and clear water. The thing that is mind blowing to me talking about how the solution of these things are actually on the minds of people, we were in Hawaii recently in Waikiki. And, back in the day in Waikiki you cannot imagine sharks, all kind of weird animals, going there. Now there is a boat that takes you there and he has a glass floor so you can see what is underneath on the ocean. And I'm just so damn depressed being on that boat, you're seeing dead corals, green algae thinking, oh my god, what have we done? And then there is this woman besides me that says, oh my god this is so beautiful. She was just looking at the clear water with an empty ocean and even with that, she was thinking that that was a beautiful thing. So yeah, the oceans are probably gonna be pretty empty. I will suppose, given again what are the places that you can go today and see, most of the fish are probably gonna be small, most of them are probably gonna be herbivorous fishes are not too many species either. Again, I'm just describing ecosystems that you can see today that have been heavily affected by people. You don't have to take my word on it. You just go to those places and see what we have done, and take that, and make the entire world like that, and that's how the world is gonna look like.
Alan Ware 33:16
Yeah, and I've heard you talk about shifting baselines - that people don't remember what grandma and grandpa saw back then, they just see it during their lifetime when everything was reduced. And that's kind of a element we have to push against the shifting baseline.
Camilo Mora 33:32
Again, that's the only reality as we are talking about realities. We always propose solutions. I wish we were just like business people. You know, when we propose things to do business, people always look at feaseability analysis. Is this gonna work? They just don't go and do it. Before they invest their money, they want to know if this works. And when we propose the solutions, for some reason, we just walk away with the first idea that we had failing to do this feasibility analysis. When you do this feasibility analysis, you get into problems exactly like we have been talking about there - shifting baselines, poverty, hunger, that make many of these solutions non-viable. There are maybe other solutions that you might not even think about that actually will have bigger consequences?
Nandita Bajaj 34:12
And then, Camilo, what are some of the main impacts of climate change that you're seeing on land ecosystems in a similar way?
Camilo Mora 34:20
Land is obviously in worse shape, okay, because we have affected it already just by us being there, or 80% of the surface of the planet. You take a satellite image on the planet, and you see where we have been and it's 80% of it. Okay, the only 20% that hasn't been touched directly by us are the North Pole and South Pole. So the footprint on the land has been quite massive. So it's pretty hard to build pristine environments on land but kind of the same physics, so to speak, apply there. The fact that you see ecosystems that are completely dominated by one or two species that have managed to survive us, the ones are prospering on these ecosystems. I have to say, though, that my scientific career has kind of been moving away. You know, I started on the oceans, coming to realize that the solution was on land, and I started land. And then I realized that the solution is on people. So I don't even study biodiversity anymore. They planet story now is people, thinking that it's not looking at what happened to the species, but what happens to us, what perhaps will scare us most, and hopefully that will make us change our mind. So the latest papers, we have been looking, for instance, at the effects of climate change on human diseases. And that, for me, is amazing that of all the papers that have written these latest papers about the impact of people have been the most impactful. Again, it's because climate change now is getting closer to home.
When we are talking about species going extinct, we just say, so sad, and we just keep going with our lives. So when you have a disease like going, hey, that's a different business. You are going into my house now. So that is actually getting a litlle more traction, and I'm hoping that that will hopefully wake up people - how real this is. But let me tell you this thing with the diseases that we just did. So we took all of the diseases that impact the humanity since the end of the Roman Empire. So these are about 13, 14, 12 hundred. Okay, and there is a database that put it all together. And remarkably, there is only between 300 and 350 diseases, obviously the same disease everywhere, okay, like things like malaria everywhere, but there's only one disease. So that made things easier for us of just taking those 300 diseases. And then we took all of the climatic changes associated with greenhouse gas emissions. So we're talking about greenhouse gases trapping heat from the sun making the planet hotter, that then creates drought that then creates conditions for wildfires. When you get wildfires and drought, you create conditions for heat waves. At the same time, when you get a lot of evaporation, you get a lot of conditions for precipitation and floods.
So we took all of these climatic changes, we put them into a nice table. And basically what we did was to look online for scientific papers that have looked at that climate change affecting that disease. So we reviewed over 70,000 papers. Every single paper was read - the abstract and the title and papers that we found important, we read that in full, trying to see what are the effects of these climatic changes on those diseases. Okay, so you know, sometimes you hear malaria, dengue, chikungunya - these few things that are affected by mosquitoes. As we finish this exercise, we found that nearly 60% of all of the diseases that had ever impacted humanity have been at some point affected by climatic changes. That will be reason for us not to be alarmed, but to be freaking scared man, right? Because if you think about what COVID did to us, COVID is nothing. COVID barely killed any people by comparisons to diseases that have wiped out 30-40% of the people okay? We could actually cure it. Imagine a disease that we cannot cure, with a degree of transmissibility like COVID and can actually kill people, okay? That's what we are messing with. When we talk about climate change affecting diseases pretty much, again, over half of the species that can cause us harm have been affected by climate change. And that again, for me is a reason to be pretty scared. You tell me, given what we just went through COVID, after having done that exercise, reading all of these diseases and how bad they are, I thought, oh wow, we just got lucky with COVID despite the fact that COVID was so bad, paralyzed the economy of the world killed 10s of 1000s of people. But I'm telling you, that's nothing compared to the other diseases that are potentially at risk of being affected by climate change.
Nandita Bajaj 38:32
And I've heard you mention, along those lines, is all of this emphasis from governments about climate adaptation is a way of just giving up. It's just saying, yeah, we're just going to somehow get used to this really extreme niche of our environment. And that's shocking, right? That's just irresponsible thinking.
Camilo Mora 38:54
It's funny that you bring adaptation. I hate the word adaptation, because adaptation tells you several things. First of all, is the fact that we fail, we give up. So future generations are going to be feeling the pain on this and are gonna judge us as a generation that gave up. And that generation you might think is far away, but that's all children. For God's sake, what kind of parents are we? We say that we're going to adapt to this, okay, like leaving this planet, like such a mess for our children. So no adaptation is to be in our brains as parents that are concerned about our children. The only problem of adaptation is that you don't want to live with adaptation. Let me give you an example of what I say to my students what adaptation is. Imagine that I'm friends with Mike Tyson, okay? And the guy has a habit of every now and then punching me in the face. You can imagine how it must feel, the punch of Mike Tyson. Probably doesn't feel nice. So what is going to be adaptation to this problem? I'm gonna buy a helmet. Okay, so that every time Mike Tyson hits me in the face, I don't feel the pain. So I'm going to be carrying this helmet for the rest of my life, as long as I am friends witih Mike Tyson. I might still feel the pain every now and then because I bet that guy punches pretty hard. And that's going to be adaptation for you. You want to live with a helmet on your face, and it's still not being protected 100% of the time? That's what adaptation is.
When we are talking about adapting to heat waves what is going to be the adaptation to heat waves? Buying an air conditioning? And every time that you go upside you risk getting killed or die because you had an oversight to know that there was a heatwave. The adaptation is there. It's called air conditioning, and you can live nicely during a heatwave with that adaptation. Imagine the electricity goes off. How is adaptation gonna work out? You look at places like Miami, they are raising the city costing billions of dollars, okay? Imagine living with that fear constantly, that any moment you can get flooded. Talk about diseases, what is adaptation, taking hospitals to people. Okay, so if I get sick in the middle of the Amazon jungle by a disease that was brought here by climate change, now I have to travel as a parent 400 miles to bring my child to a hospital. That's adaptation for you, okay? You make it easier for me to have a road, okay, I can take a car now still 400 miles away, and still my child was sick. That's adaptation for you. So no, we don't want to live with adaptation. Adaptation is just us accepting that we're going to be living with this pain in our butt for the rest of our lives. I just refuse to accept it.
Nandita Bajaj 41:13
Also, just the fact that the climate change impacts are going to hit the poorest people in the poorest countries first. In countries where people are living closer to the ocean where, you know, the temperature is already high. In the tropics, for example, and the couple of billion people in the even, in the most recent study that just came out that said, it's mostly high temperature, high fertility countries that are going to be hit the most gravely because of these impacts. So for them, adaptation is not even an option. They're actually just going to die from some of these impacts in the coming decades or be displaced.
Camilo Mora 41:56
You see that already happening. You see people in the Middle East and in Africa, migrating their countries because of floods, droughts being forced to move to the developed countries. The thing that blows my mind is how either ignorant or stupid we are failing to see these associations, especially for people from the first world thinking that somehow you are going to get isolated there, that you are going to build a wall and it'sa gonna be just your race, the ones that are gonna get lucky to survive there. You know, it's kind of funny that if we look at history, there are few people that we can go back in history and look to have wanted to have these communities and societies isolated are people that we don't remember well in history. So I don't want to take the conversation away from where we are, but that's kind of what we want to do now, you know, keeping these other people away from us in the first world, like that's going to fix the problem, when in reality, history is not gonna judge us well. And, to make matters worse, it's going to make our lives miserable. It's already making our lives miserabe. Also these are problems that is not going to get fixed by you preventing people from coming to your country.
Nandita Bajaj 42:54
And we're starting to unfortunately see that happen at a much greater rate now where nationalism and authoritarianism is on the rise, where people are getting worried about being overrun by the displaced refugees. It's a bizarre thing that's happening, especially in a lot of the Western countries where fertility rates are declining. Instead of understanding the impacts of climate change, and what it's doing to the entire world, there is a backlash, and there is now increased pressures for nations to increase their fertility, which seems just completely nonsensical.
Camilo Mora 43:34
It's nonsense. If you were a developed country, and you had that problem of your supply of labor, you can say to the world, I'm gonna bring anybody from around the world that is equipped. You're gonna get the best people from all of those countries coming to your country. That's gonna increase the IQ of your country quite considerably, increase the productivity, but no, you don't do it. The reason is, then why? And you will start seeing all of these issues of culture. And religion is huge, man, the hypocrisy of religion is mind blowing. It's funny, because I'm not a religious person, but I believe in God. Where I grew up, we go to bed every day praying and thinking to God, but we're not very religious people in the sense that you are not going to come and fool us with stuff. And the hypocrisy of religion is mind blowing to me, when you see for instance, things like don't do to others, but you don't want others to do to you, the situation that you are talking about their reason for why we don't look at the entire planet. As a single community, we'd fix so many problems that we have today. But unfortunately, we just like to keep segregated.
Alan Ware 44:29
You've long recognized the importance of population growth and overpopulation as a root cause of climate change and biodiversity crisis. You've written several academic papers on the subject. And we greatly appreciate having a distinguished scientist like you aligned with that our cause of sustainable population. But we've been curious what the response of some of the other scientists have been about your advocacy and approach on overpopulation?
Camilo Mora 44:56
Oh, no, you cannot imagine how much opposition has there been among the scientists. Let me just give you this example. We are looking at a global paper on what is affecting biodiversity. And we put everything onto that paper, climatic changes, habitat, and we put human population in it, and human population comes on top of all of the drivers imagine that they will illusion of life on our planet have been changed by all kinds of weird things. And no one factor is more significant affecting biodiversity than people today and we show that mathematically. So we got the time to write the conclusion, my conclusion on that one paper was, obviously, we need to reduce the size of the world's human population. And all the scientists are like, are you crazy? We had to remove that from this paper. I was like, What the hell are you talking about? This is the conclusion of the paper. This is what is bad. We prove it mathematically. So the solution should be their problem. No, no, no, the solution gotta be that we gotta put more protected areas. And you are you freaking kidding me?
Nandita Bajaj 45:47
Oh, my God.
Camilo Mora 45:49
We just proved that protected areas don't work in this same paper and arguments is not that they didn't believe the numbers, they just saw them. They just didn't want to get to that conclusion. Fortunately, I was the lead author and I was just, look man, we have in the papers, something called the acknowledgments. If you want to go from the authors to their acknowledgements, that's your call. I'm not gonna push you there. But I'm the lead author on the paper. I had done the analysis ethically. Man, this is like me being bribed by I don't know what, you know, this is what the science is telling us. How are you going to conclude something completely out of the scope of what we found? I'm telling you my whole career, I had found maybe two or three people that I had there to join me on these things. And luckily, I had a couple of papers with those three people, one of them Science, of all places. But no, scientifically, there is an incredible amount of fear on this. And unfortunately, again, there's just too many things for a scientist to lose, if they were to speak up about this, even if the numbers support them. But they don't want to get to the conclusion.
Nandita Bajaj 46:47
Yeah, and I just want to say, you know, part of the resistance comes from I think just there have been some bad historical examples of kind of the rich Global North trying to point fingers at the Global South, where fertility rates were high, without doing anything to really scale back their consumption or looking inward to see how they could be part of the solution. So some of that has created this suspicion that anytime anyone speaks about population, it's about pointing fingers and it's about blaming certain countries and that, of course, has to be addressed and reparations have to be made, but that doesn't make population a non-issue. I'll give you an example. The United Nations Population Fund, their main job is to look at the impacts of global population on human rights, on the rest of the world, on nature. They recently came out and completely rejected population as a problem. In fact, they looked at a survey that was conducted by YouGov. And the survey asked 8,000 people across eight different countries what their opinion was around population issues. And out of those eight countries, four of them are heavily populated countries. One of them is my birth country, India, which is now the most populous country in the world. Then there's Brazil, Egypt and Nigeria, all overpopulated countries, and majority of the people responded, we believe population in our country is too large, and the fertility rates are too high. And I would imagine that, like you and like me and our personal experience of experiencing overpopulation at a personal level, people are talking about the impacts that they are experiencing. The United Nations Population Fund comes out, and completely dismisses the results and says, these people are being ignorant, and they are being influenced by the media that's alarming everybody that we are overpopulated. So they're actually dismissing not just the scientific data that's telling us that population has an effect. They are dismissing the people who think and say that we are overpopulated, and that we are the ones struggling from not having jobs, not having enough natural resources, not having any green space, and basically being crumbled under the population pressures.
Camilo Mora 49:19
You've mentioned that example, let me give you this other example. So there is something called the IPCC report that is written every five years. And every one of those documents is about 5,000 pages long, all of the scientific knowledge of humanity is condensed on these volumes about climate change. And all of that comes down to a simple mathematical equation, which is CO2 is equal to consumption times population. That's it. The entire problem of climate change is that - consumption times population, and you go through thousands of pages that document this. So there is an issue called solutions. And it's about 800 pages long in the latest report. I started to read this. So one is consumption of the reference population, you will expect that that book on solutions, at least half of that is going to be dealing with population problems. I started to read this and 100 pages into this, and I haven't come across a single mention of population. So I take the entire PDF, I say I'm not gonna read this. And I looked for all kinds of keywords related to population. And not once the population problem came in Google. Do it. Do the exercise to take the entire PDF, don't read it, because it's 800 pages long and check population there. Not once population is mentioned as a solution. Family planning, woman empowerment, all of these things, no mention once as the problem, despite the fact that they recognize everywhere on that document that climate change is the multiplication of consumption times population.
Nandita Bajaj 50:41
Shocking and irresponsible, right? Because part of it is a lot of the people who are behind the denial are not suffering the direct impacts of population pressures. They are looking at abstract discussions, but is it population or consumption, you know, a lot of them are sitting in very convenient, comfortable offices in universities having these discussions not actually crumbling under the pressures of population.
Camilo Mora 51:08
Sometimes I wonder if we're just being played out by something here. For instance, recently, I read a news article about China reducing their population and how their military might or the world you know, like millions of soldiers, and how with this declining population, they're gonna have trouble there. So there is no motivation. I was thinking that their motivation was something else. But further they are pushing to have a bigger army as the reason for you to have more people on some of these countries. When you think about climate change, and you get people fighting for all kinds of weird reasons by they're being played out by interest groups, that one finance this misinformation campaigns, because they want people to keep consuming. So you have all companies that is not in their best interest to have their business taken away from them so they say we're not going to produce more greenhouse gases. So there is a movie called Don't Look Up. That movie is so well done. This thing is right in our faces, much dangerous than we ever thought. We had a solution right there, the solution is right there. But the window or the time window that we had to fix it is sliding between our fingers, because again, we just fail to come together to deal with this. And everybody who has speaks up gets attacked by these few interest groups. Some of them fail. The attacks are just too many, and many are not that brave.
Nandita Bajaj 52:25
And we actually had a conversation with historian of science, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, who actually studied where all of this disinformation is actually being spread. And it is the wealthiest of people across, I mean she mainly looked at America, but it's happening all over in Europe and a lot of other countries where it's this free market fundamentalists who want no government interference, no environmental regulations. They just want liberty and freedom and just be able to do whatever they want and let the markets run our countries. These are the people who are the biggest mouthpieces for spreading disinformation about overpopulation. And it's them, and then the anti-choice religious groups combined together spreading all of these myths.
Camilo Mora 53:15
It's funny, these few people that they think that they are going to be okay, we all live in this planet, we're all going to share the misery that is going to come regardless of how billionaire you are. And I wish one billionaire could hear this because, at the end of the day, all of these solutions come down to money and people with power. Unfortunately, they are not getting the message, or they are getting the wrong message, which is to think that you're going to get away with this and nobody's going to.
Alan Ware 53:39
So you have worked to do some real on-the-ground positive type of change through large scale tree planting, thousands of trees you've planted in Hawaii, and in your family's land in Columbia. So what do you see is the potential for widespread tree planting to lower CO2 emissions?
Camilo Mora 53:57
Look, I don't want to give you my opinion. I'm gonna give you the numbers on this. So there is area to plant a trillion trees on this planet with no conflict with land - land that has been eroded, land that nobody wants, land that is crying out for restoration. And we can easily plant a trillion trees on that land. It could remove easily 1/3 of human carbon emissions so far. You do the calculations of how much carbon they can sequester, easily 1/3. Imagine what that will do to the protection of biodiversity. All of those thousands of species that are only wanting to be alive, they had nowhere to go, we find harm on these forests that we can put in there. It's a trillion, okay? You say shoot, but that's too many. Okay, so what I'm thinking is, I'm gonna give you numbers again, you take every human being, 8 billion of us, and you calculate how many trees do we, every one of us have to plant. That gives you about 120 trees. So if we get a campaign to move the entire humanity to make it our goal for everyone who has to plant 120 trees, we will plant a trillion trees. We will cover all of the land that can be potentially restored, removing three quarters of humanity emissions, protecting biodiversity like nobody's business, To be honest with you that's all what I do now. It took me 30 years to get to this conclusion. I don't even want to do papers anymore. Because I'm describing what everybody knows. We don't need more science for this. So all my focus now are how to make that happen.
In Hawaii, we had a campaign. I worked on this with my daughter. And it has been part of the exercise where children can actually do this, and actually she does that much better than I do. Now all these presentations is my daughter, the one that gives the presentation. And I want adults to see how a child can get it. So we go talk to schools. We have talked to easily 15,000 school children in Hawaii. Then we take their families to come and plant trees. Yeah, she has been alone since she was six years old. She's now 15. But children won a prize by the city council of my state for her work as a person leading these initiatives getting children to go and plant trees in Hawaii. She was gonna go and speak up, but I told her baby, we don't want to talk anymore. I am sick of talking. I want to do. So let's walk the talk. And that's what she's doing there. No more talking as well. We are planting trees. And we have discovered that is very hard to do this for many reasons, technical and practical reasons. And we have been sorting through them and trying to overcome those problems. And the latest, just before the COVID, we brought 2,000 people and we planted 10,000 trees in two hours. So basically it was a piece of land that was totally denuded of everything, and we walk into this place and we walk out two hours later, leaving 10,000 trees.
You can point out tens of papers that I have written that have been in the New York Times and Washington Post some 12 times. Science and Nature, I think I have over 10 papers already there. Nothing makes me more proud than recently somebody telling me that they named that place Camilo's forest. Doesn't compare to all of the achievements that I have had in life. I had never felt more proud than that time that person told me this, and I'm making it all my life. There's no controversy on this. I'm telling you, I have worked on this with tens of thousands of people. And not once I had come across a climate denier again, okay, the kids get it. And not only they get it, they want to do it. So I find it much easier to work with children than trying to make a difference as a scientist. First of all, we don't have any traction. If as a scientist what we want to do is a difference for the world to become a better place, I don't think it's going to be the traditional way that we do it. As a scientist we're gonna be dying, publishing tons of papers with probably a lot of prestige, but nothing to show for when it comes down to where we can make a difference for even species or people. And I have come to the realization, fortunately, I mean the latest few years, but it's took me an incredible amount of knowledge and history to get here. And that's all that I'm doing right now.
Nandita Bajaj 57:54
And Camilo, have you seen any kind of science from your own work in this about, do we have sufficient water resources to be able to maintain, are there any impacts on soil erosion, biodiversity, etcetera?
Camilo Mora 58:09
Look, it's funny because you see that controversy every now and then coming in. Are we doing anything good by planting trees? And it doesn't really matter. That's how the planet was, the planet was loaded with trees. We've cut them down. We've got to put them back. It's our social responsibility, but that discussion is there. Some people that criticize this, unfortunately, I gotta be biased, because I just know that those trees need to be put back in there. Yeah, some people have criticized the costs of doing it, and I don't want to pay for it. I think that everybody should do it. And I don't want to pay a trillion dollars to do it. I want to pay seriously just a little amount of money that requires to produce the seedlings for everyone who has to do our part and realize that if we want a better planet, you gotta do it with fewer people.
Nandita Bajaj 58:49
We wholeheartedly agree with that. And of course, preventing the forest and trees that are already here from being cut down for all sorts of other projects. Well, thank you so much Camilo for such a rich conversation. You know, your passion, your care, your intellect, and your hard work in helping us all better understand the impacts of human expansionism on the planet is truly admirable.
Alan Ware 59:16
And all your work over the years, these metadata studies that you've done that get published, they really help all of us understand the delicacy of life, and how interconnected it all is, and how deep it all goes. Thank you for that.
Camilo Mora 59:30
Thank you very much. I hope next time we are talking about the trillion trees that we just planted.
Alan Ware 59:35
That's all for this edition of the overpopulation podcast. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:04
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
