Climate Change From an Earth Systems Perspective

Dave: [00:02:00] So my guest today is Joe Brewer. And I don’t know, Joe, if you’d call yourself an environmental activist, maybe that’s a pigeonhole you don’t want to be in, but you are certainly committed to doing what you can to reverse, mitigate the effects of climate change. And particularly, you’re focused in one specific area of mitigation Earth regeneration.

So I’m very enthusiastic to have Joe on the show today because he’s a great example of one person who can have outsized effects and influence by using his imagination and by following his personal convictions and commitments. So, Joe, just briefly, let me introduce you. You started out living in the Ozark region of the state of Missouri. And from what you told me, you grow up on a chicken farm, right?

Joe: [00:03:00] Yeah, that’s right.

Dave: Somehow you went from the chicken farm to becoming a physics undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, studied physics, and then from there, somehow you went to studying climate science at the University of Illinois.

Joe: The undergraduate was in Missouri. I did my undergraduate at Southeast Missouri State, but atmospheric science was at the University of Illinois.

Dave: So, a significant transition right? And now fast forward to today, you are involved in something called Earth Regenerators, which is a group, a loosely formed group at the present time that’s loosely committed to regenerating Earth systems in order to reduce the effects of climate change. What I’d like to do is spend some time talking about how you made each of those big transitions in your life.

I guess as much as anything to show other people that it’s possible to show that there is such a path.

Joe: [00:04:00] Yeah, that sounds like fun. Let’s do it. How would you like me to begin?

Dave: How about the chicken farm in the Ozarks? What was that? What was that experience? And how did you start out there?

Joe: Well, one thing that happened for me is that both of my parents were from Saint Louis, and during the Cold War, with all of the different kinds of existential risks and fears that existed, the vision that they had was to go live in the country as part of the back to the land movement. And so they moved from Saint Louis on the east side of Missouri to southwest Missouri, close to Arkansas and Oklahoma, to start chicken farming and growing their own food and having a big garden. And our house was an underground house to protect us from nuclear attack and a lot of things that were typical of the Cold War era.

Dave: What year was this that they made that move?

Joe: They made that move in 1973 or 1974.

Dave: Everybody was thinking that way at that time.

Joe: [00:05:00] Yeah, just after my oldest brother was born and so one of the things that was really a defining feature of my life was having parents who are from the city and where while neither of them had college degrees, I was the first in my family to go to college. They both were intelligent and well-educated people living in the country.

So part of my experience was working on a big industrial chicken farm, collecting dead birds, you know, to keep them from spreading diseases. And you know, feeding the chickens the steroid-enhanced chicken feed that would grow them to these gargantuan sizes. And mostly I hated it. It was pretty disgusting. And one thing that really stood out for me, even as a child, was that there were just these really terrible ways that we treated animals.

There were really profound disconnects between what people did for fun and what was good for the environment. [00:06:00] Like, I remember throwing old TV sets, you know, like in our forest, on our farm with a big pile of garbage, like a truckload of garbage, and then throwing rocks to, you know, burst the cathode ray tube of the TVs. And this is normal to do these kinds of things.

This was, you know, a country kid thing circa 1980. But gradually, I really started to discover that my safe haven and my sense of protection came from spending time alone in nature. Yeah, I was picked on and bullied. I was a strange kid. I was the nerd at my school and I was like physically awkward and uncoordinated and was the last one picked for all the sports teams.

And on recess, I just tried not to have people try and pick on me and get into fights with me. So I just wanted to be alone a lot of the time when I was a kid, and that meant that I spent a lot of time from our farm going out into the woods, hanging out by the creek, and really getting to know myself and solitude and nature.

[00:07:00] And so the first important step, I think, in my story is that I found that when the humans around me weren’t being very good, you know when people were difficult to be around that I would find solace and comfort, and healing by being alone in nature.

Dave: When you were spending this time in nature, you were primarily alone. You were just kind of poking around and exploring. You said you had a favorite place down near the creek. Did you find your territory was always expanding? Did you stay on the farm? Did you find your way off the farm as a kid?

Joe: Even as a kid I had a lot of energy, I was a hyperactive child. For me, furniture was something to climb on and not sit on, I was one of those kids. And so it’s not surprising later in life, I found martial arts and dance and theater and things to do with my body. But as a kid, I would go out and take walks.

I had insomnia that started at about the age of eight, where I just would lay down and my mind would start racing and I couldn’t go to sleep [00:08:00] because we lived in a country. I could just, you know, without even telling my parents, go out the front door, go walking on the dirt roads, walk around under the stars for hours at a time, and just be lost in my thoughts in the landscape.

Dave: As far as your parents were concerned, they didn’t need to keep an eye on you. You’re just, what, you needed to check in at certain times?

Joe: Well, it was helpful that my parents divorced when I was eight years old. Helpful in the sense that I had a single mother raising four kids and running a big farm, which means she couldn’t possibly pay attention to us the whole time. And we had to take care of ourselves quite a lot. Just as she was doing chores and putting food on the table.

And then, you know, we would do some chores too. But there was a lot to do on the farm. So we ended up with four kids. We weren’t like raising ourselves. My mother was there and was very attentive and very committed, but we also had a lot of free, unstructured time to just go outdoors and play for hours and then come back home before dinner.

[00:09:00] And this was just part of country life in the eighties and I think even more so for younger generations or for earlier generations. But I was one of the last generations in the United States to have country life growing up with very few constraints, with lots of free time outdoors. So it was common for someone to come back from the barn with a broken leg because they had jumped out of the rafters or, you know, just accidents would happen. Not just in my family, this was just typical country life. So I would say like, when I went to college much later, I didn’t like the constraints of walking on the sidewalk when I could cut corners, walking through the grass. You know, I wouldn’t want to wait for the stoplight if there was no traffic.

I just had this sense of a sort of common sense feeling of, well, as long as I’m paying attention to my surroundings, I can make intelligent decisions. And I had a lot of self-confidence in that way, which comes with solitary time in nature.

Dave: [00:10:00] If we could jump ahead then to this, it almost sounds idyllic apart from your chores on the chicken farm, but spending that much time in nature is quite unusual especially these days, I think, relatively little supervision from your parents. We could jump forward to when you went to college then how did you go from being this kid that found so much, what, contentment, I guess, peace and adventure and nature to studying physics? Did you always have a scientific band? I mean, that’s that seems like a bit of a leap to me.

Joe: Well, one thing that happened for me was I was in a small school where I had very little academic opportunity. They didn’t offer trigonometry or calculus in a single class in my high school. So when I went to college, I had a full-ride scholarship. I was the valedictorian of my class. By the end of seventh grade, I was the only student in my class still making straight A’s, so everyone knew I would be valedictorian as of the end of seventh grade.

[00:11:00] Well, all of the other kids I grew up with got held back in seventh grade, dropped out by the age of 16 or at the age of 16 when it was legal in the state of Missouri to drop out of high school. And several of them became drug addicts and alcoholics. Some went to prison and several of them died.

So I actually came from a harsh upbringing, but I was the straight-A student. And so when I went to college, I could study whatever I wanted. I had a four-year academic scholarship, and I just started taking all kinds of classes, everything I could find. And I did have a strong interest in science as a teenager. I had a strong interest in philosophy without really knowing what it was because it’s hard to find good books and to really delve into it.

So when I got to college with a full-ride scholarship, pretty much right away, I double majored. And initially, it was physics and philosophy, and I started dabbling in theater classes. [00:12:00] But then I found that I could invent my own major. So I created an interdisciplinary major in physics, philosophy, and dance, which is sort of like getting a little bit more than a minor in each of those areas with a lot of integrative cross-cutting classes.

And I used my full-ride scholarship as leverage to convince my professors and the deans of the colleges to make exceptions for me. So for example, when I did the interdisciplinary degree in physics, philosophy, and dance, I was allowed a maximum of 6 hours of independent study toward my major. I ended up getting almost 27 hours of independent study.

Dave: Wow. 

Joe: I just kept inventing my own programs of study and getting permission and getting approval. And what I learned along the way was that with enough trust and good relationships with my professors, I can bend and break a lot of rules. And so by the end of four years, I had combined pretty deep study and modern dance, [00:13:00] philosophical foundations and pragmatism, and the study of quantum mechanics together with explorations into the formation of knowledge and how we experience the world, the philosophy of John Dewey and other related philosophers. So I was just again, sort of like an intellectual version of that forest and that river. I was just roaming around wherever I wanted with a lot more freedom than anyone else around me.

Dave: I think almost anyone I know would say, Wow, those three things don’t fit together at all, I suppose philosophy and science more so. But dance, I mean, it’s pretty unusual that you would be able to put those three disciplines together. Now. What happened then after you graduated with this multidisciplinary education? Did you go straight on to graduate school and how did you make the switch from what you had studied as an undergraduate to what you studied in graduate school?

Joe: I actually had three bachelor’s degrees. [00:14:00] That was also unusual. I had a scholarship for being in the top 2% on the ACT in the state of Missouri, which lasted for longer than the four-year scholarship that I had, which meant that if I could convince the university to undergraduate me, I could actually continue my scholarship for a longer period of time.

The scholarship lasted until I finished my bachelor’s degree. And so I was able because I had formed friendships with the secretarial staff throughout most of the university. All of this is at Southeast Missouri State University and Cape Gerardo, Missouri. I was able to go into the registrar’s office and get permission to revoke my graduation status and then go to the financial aid office and established my scholarship so that I could finish a physics degree.

But the courses were offered very infrequently, so I went ahead and finished an applied math and physics degree at the same time and spent six years as an undergraduate student. [00:15:00] And during that time I developed a pretty deep interest in chaos theory and complexity science. So when I went to graduate school initially it was at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and a physics program studying material science.

But I didn’t get along with my advisor. He basically was an absentee professor. He didn’t care about his graduate students and I wanted more attention. And then a professor who was from the University of Illinois and Champaign came down to southern Illinois and gave a talk in the physics department about satellite, remote sensing, and cloud physics. How do clouds form?

What is the relationship of clouds to climate and how do you study them with satellite data? And I was just enamored and blown away. So I asked him if I could join him and I was admitted mid-year in January instead of in August when my students come in and came in the back door into the atmospheric science program at the University of Illinois.

Joe: [00:16:00] And my background in physics and philosophy and mathematics made me a pretty ideal candidate to be able to make that jump. But it was my interest and complexity and pattern formation that really took me to the next level of learning how the patterns of the dynamic Earth work within an atmospheric science department.

Dave: So was your goal when you signed up there to get a PhD or was it to get a master’s degree?

Joe: I was intending to get a PhD. and what happened was really, I wanted to go to the University of Illinois because I knew they had a place called the Center for Complex Systems Research, and I didn’t know much about atmospheric science, but I was a physicist and I could, you know, jump in and do the work. And I really fell in love with Earth System Science, which is a more elaborate and integrative body of knowledge that atmospheric science is part of.

That was just by sheer luck of ending up in a world-class atmospheric science research center. The University of Illinois is interesting in that [00:17:00] the atmospheric science department started as an independent research center as part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Then later they created the Graduate program, so there were 12 professors and 30 students. It was tiny, and the professors had more funding per professor than any other department at the university.

Dave: More so than business or law. That’s remarkable.

Joe: Yeah, and more so than engineering or material science. And so I was in this incredible world-class research center that was just designing their undergraduate major while I was there and had yet to launch it. So I landed in the middle of, as you know from your experience at the University of Illinois, one of the top research institutions on the planet.

I mean, it’s just an incredible place and it’s the third-largest public library in the United States. So I just had a field day with 36 entire buildings of libraries.

Dave: Third largest university library in the United States, I believe.

Joe: [00:18:00] It might be a public university, but there’s also an Illinois libraries network, which interestingly includes universities in Arizona and other places. That is probably the largest consortium of book-sharing in the United States. But because the University of Illinois is where the first network hub of the Internet was established and other interesting things, it was a truly phenomenal place to go to graduate school.

I was like a kid in a candy store there. And one thing that happened to me was the chair of my department, who is a man named Don Wuebbles, was part of this group called the Tiger Taskforce of Atmospheric Chemists which had helped solve the problem of the ozone hole. So these, like top-notch scientists, he had gotten a grant to create an undergraduate major in Earth system science.

And I jumped in to help design the curriculum with a graduate student in sociology. [00:19:00] So we mapped out 400 university courses that existed at the University of Illinois that could become part of an undergraduate major that we designed called Earth Systems Environment in Society. So I got this profound breadth and depth of exposure to what would be possible to do to reinvent a university in service to studying the dynamic earth.

And we ended up launching this undergraduate major that’s called the School of Earth and Society which was later formed around the atmospheric science, geology, and geography departments. This undergraduate major was a core part of that design. So you can see my education was always interdisciplinary and jumping across fields. But in a way, I was almost groomed or prepared for integrating massive bodies of knowledge, which was a project for a part of the time in Champaign.

Dave: We don’t know each other well, but this does seem to be a pattern of yours. [00:20:00] And in prior conversations I’ve heard you talk about how innovation occurs at the intersections of different disciplines, different intellectual fields. And I mean, I agree with you completely on that topic. It’s typically not people who are at the center of a field of knowledge who are winning the Nobel Prizes.

There’s somebody who has a cross-disciplinary perspective or experience or something to bring to it. I think that one of the remarkable things about you that I’ve gotten to understand in the time I’ve known you is how really widespread and multifaceted your interests are. I think that’s remarkable.

Joe: Yeah. One thing that came out of this for me was as a New Year’s resolution, this was January 1st of 2004. I decided that I would give myself one year to fully and profoundly understand the planetary ecological crisis, which means I spent an entire year depressing myself reading every, -and I was at the University of Illinois, so I had that library to go to.

Dave: [00:21:00] Right.

Joe: Studying research articles and books. And then December 31st, a year later, I had so much trauma and emotional pain and anguish from what I learned. And it took me more than ten years to come out of a profound depression from understanding the true state of the world. And so if you look the world in the eyes today as the famous death doula, Stephen Jenkinson says, those who awakened to the world today awakened with a sob, which is if you really pay attention to what’s happening in the world and you open your heart to it, it will cause you pain and grief and suffering because there’s a lot of pain and grief and suffering in the world right now. And that was pretty much what happened to me during the year 2004.

Dave: Interesting. I’m sure you’re familiar with Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician who has before he passed away several years ago, [00:22:00] had made himself pretty famous by publishing a book and by presenting all kinds of information about how the world is really much better than a lot of people think it is. And since then, Steven Pinker has also picked up that flag and carried it.

So I think it would be almost remiss to let your statement stand about how grim the world is because they’re going to be people listening to this, who are going to be thinking, “Oh, but what about…?”

Joe: Hans Rosling built a reputation on propaganda that he could present statistics honestly. But actually, if you study cognitive biases and logical fallacies, he made them all over the place. And he was actually a massive abuser of statistics to lie and spread a neoliberal corporatist agenda. Steven Pinker has been similarly discredited. He just makes outlandish false claims. And because it’s so heavily funded and supported by corporate media infrastructure, he’s able to perpetuate his reputation well beyond what his intellectual accomplishments would warrant.

Joe: [00:23:00] But just as one example, to start this conversation, there is now a massive body of evidence that we are causing human activities, are causing extinctions of nonhuman species at a rate of at least 10,000 times faster than the background rate. So just as one area of research to say there’s a typical rate of extinction at any time and a typical rate of new species, and actually after a mass extinction, you have periods where biodiversity goes up, which means new species form more quickly than species go away on average over the span of millions of years.

And right now the extinction rate is at least 10,000 times faster than the background rate, and it’s almost entirely caused by humans destroying habitats, through the destruction of natural ecosystems. So just as one example, out of many, [00:24:00] out of thousands that could be shown, they would all point to the breakdown and destruction of the Earth’s biosphere, planetary health, increasing inequality, increasing problems with discernment and the ability to manage complexity.

And there are very diverse sets of social, economic, political, and environmental trends, all of which go in the negative, that go against the lies of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker, that they’re basically just corporate stalls who represent a story that only the maybe 2% of the human population in a bubble of privilege formed around the hoarding and destruction of wealth from everywhere else on Earth through 500 years of colonialism, could even falsely claim that the world is a better place.

And so it’s sort of outlandish how well documented and how diverse the data trends are showing the real state of the planet. [00:25:00] But unfortunately, because of things like academic departments and universities forcing the maintaining fragmentation of knowledge and the active suppression of knowledge synthesis across fields, that there are very few places to get a holistic and integrative education to see how the whole planet and the globalized economy are functioning as whole systems.

Dave: What you’re saying makes me think of how easy it has been for climate skeptics and climate deniers. I don’t really like the phrase climate deniers, they’re not denying the climate, what they’re denying is whether climate change is real or that is caused by human beings. But anyway, I tend to follow these people who are in that camp just because I’m trying to understand what they’re saying and if there’s any possible validity to it and so on.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a YouTube video by a fellow who, as you’ll probably know his name right off the top of your head. [00:26:00] He’s a physics professor at Princeton, and he claims that there is no physics argument for why carbon dioxide should cause climate change. And, you know, he’s just one of the dozens, probably hundreds of people who are out there saying these kinds of things.

But because of his expertise in physics, he’s a senior professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. People seem to think, oh, well, he’s saying this. I mean, how could he be attacking this? And it wouldn’t be true. But I think the point that always occurs to me is he’s saying that. Yeah, but what is it physicists know about climate science?

What does he know about the complexity of the interactions of all these different factors and how much study has he given that? I think that’s the point you were driving at a moment ago.

Joe: That’s the general point in that person’s case. I’m not remembering his name, but I do know who he is. He specialized in rockets and rocket thrusters  [00:27:00] and was more of a mechanical engineer throughout a physics undergraduate degree, and he’s funded to the tune of several million dollars a year by Exxon Mobil. And you just go through the litany of reasons why he is the opposite of a credible source. But what’s interesting is that it was in the year 1812 that carbon dioxide was shown to be a greenhouse gas that it absorbed radiation. And that’s like Physics 098. It’s not even physics it’s 101. So when a physicist who makes any claim otherwise is either an idiot and doesn’t deserve to have the name physicist or is lying and it’s very easy to lie when you’re being paid so much money and elevated to do it.

The more insidious thing is not these people who engage in such unethical actions, the more insidious thing is that the human mind evolved to deal with problems that are not nearly as complex as climate change. And this is what’s more interesting, is that [00:28:00] okay, let’s take the wrongdoers out because there’s actually a tiny number of those people. The real challenge is that to understand the dynamics, we actually have to build out the conceptual understandings to even see with the right eyes to understand how the planet works.

Just to give an example of this, that’s well-known in the history of science. Plate tectonics was proposed in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that it became established as an empirically based and supported theory that could then go on to become verified as true, took half a century and it was considered ridiculous and absurd for the first 30 years of that time.

And this turned out to have planetary significance in 2011 when there was a giant tsunami in Japan and the Fukushima nuclear reactor got overloaded. And the reason for this is that the Fukushima reactor was designed and built [00:29:00] just before plate tectonics was widely accepted as a field back in the time when people thought it was impossible, physically impossible, to have an earthquake on the Richter scale that went above an eight.

And so they didn’t design for a magnitude nine earthquake because they were, quote, “physically impossible”. Because if you didn’t have subduction zones and plate tectonics, you could not generate those earthquakes. So the Fukushima reactor, which was a design from the mid-1970s, was able to overflow its cooling units and explode because plate tectonics is a way of seeing the world.

And so there are other ideas like this about the dynamic Earth that are very, very important to be able to understand what’s going on, which means that to even grasp, for example, that climate change is merely a symptom and not a cause. [00:30:00] And to understand that climate change is a subset of the carbon cycle of the Earth and the carbon cycle includes all living things because we only know of carbon-based life and all living being is based on carbon.

And so things like this start to reveal that there are interdependencies that are just profoundly nuanced and multifaceted, that this is where, you know, we can let this charlatan at Princeton just be a charlatan at Princeton. But what’s really scary is how easily we cannot see what’s really going on, even as massive amounts of data have accumulated that would reveal it if people had the right conceptual lenses to see it.