YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Franzen

lines on the record: 45
first: 2021-08-10
most recent: 2021-08-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because it seems like we're not telling the truth here. And I do it because I enjoy conflict, that's for sure. I do it because...”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I hate conflict and I'm at great pains not to Put myself in the way of the hotheaded responses, particularly on social media. It's one of many reasons I'm not on social media, so it would just upset me because I just like I become incredibly tense if there's even a little bit of conflict in the room. At the same time, yeah, I do ask for it. But I think that that comes directly out of my notion of what a writer should do. The writer should try to tell the truth. And if you have a A pension, for better or worse, for honesty, it's very distressing to witness a dishonest discourse. And I, for example, I did feel that the discourse on climate had become so saturated with bad faith and dishonesty that it just physically upset me. I have to speak up because”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A disapprover when it comes to that. You just have to be, you have to recognize with the gravity of having kids when it's very, very likely that 15 years from now the world is going to be a scary, scary place, if not sooner. And, you know, but in a sense, it's a vital human activity having kids rearing kids, giving them a chance. We need our firefighters and we need our farmers and we need lots of parents because that's the way. Things go with us.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As it happens, two of my nephews have new babies in the past three weeks, and that's a very joyous experience for my brothers in particular. And obviously for the nephews and their spouses, I confess that I am not terribly sorry that I'm not a parent, that I'm not bequeathing such a scary world to children. But I had other reasons for not having kids. And it's what is it from much ado. The world must be peopled. We're not all just going to live to be 780 and then there are no kids coming up behind us. Life has to go on. So I'm not...”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all, not at all. And I think one thing the human species brings to the planet is a level of intelligence and a level of emotion sophistication that allows, here's finally after however many hundreds of millions of years of evolution, here finally is a species that's able to really appreciate it. I don't think tanagers spend much time looking at herons saying, oh, that is an amazing bird, that heron. The tannager is basically just thinking about the tanager. And is there a male intruding on my territory? Better go check it out. That's kind of the extent of it. I think we have a unique ability to appreciate and to articulate, to care about, and to preserve the beauty of this planet. For that capacity alone, I have to give the human race a lot of credit.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, it's my bread and butter. I'm mostly a novelist, this whole environment thing is a sideline for me, and I'd be out of work without people. And, you know, I know a lot of people, and I really like them. But also, it's”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very much with a view to biodiversity because Costa Rica is a treasure house of global biodiversity, a tiny little speck of a country with 3% of the species of the world. And they are suffering because they are watching as the climate dries things out and heats up. They're watching insect populations decline. They're watching species have to move up hillsides where it's cooler to survive. And eventually they're going to get to the top of the hill and there won't be any place to go. So that's all very discouraging. But in the meantime, they're out there to people making this huge difference. And there are scores, if not hundreds, of people from the community totally invested in this. And it's just an amazing project. It's called the Guanacoaste Conservation Area. Don't ask me to speak Spanish at this late point in the hour.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that really was a couple. Dan Jansen and Winnie Hallwalks, Costa Rica had on paper an amazing national park system, but a lot of that was paper park. And Dan and Winnie basically recognized that in a poor country, you can't just put up a sign saying keep out around a natural area, that you have to If local people are being told, no, you can't go in there and do your little small scale mining. You can't go in there and cut down trees. You can't go in there and kill animals. They'll say, well, I got kids. I'm hungry. I'm going to do it anyway. So they have been working for 30 years in a very, very inspiring way to, from the ground up, Beginning with community buy-in to not only preserve dry forest in the north of Costa Rica,”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not just the land around you, although that's critical as well, especially if you become more reliant on that land for your food and your water. But I think also issues of social justice, having racism is a big problem. And communities that are torn apart along political lines or racial lines or wealth inequality lines, those are toxic elements. And I consider it a very valid climate action to fight for social justice, to fight systemic racism, to fight wealth inequality, because again, those are not those problems are not marks of a healthy community. Those are unhealthy community markers.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creates better community, local community is really, really powerful. And what the pandemic has given us the first glimpse of is what the world might be like when globalism begins to break down. Because among the, I mentioned a bunch of fragile things earlier, I think the system of global commerce is actually rather fragile. And climate shocks are going to, I think, disrupt increasingly a lot of what has bound the world together through globalism. And we are going to be probably more reliant on our communities, our local communities than we have been now. So investment in any kind of kind-spirited activity in the community, that would also be on my list.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Groups like that would be number one, two, and three on my list. But I also think it's really, really important to... Kindness is what we need, kindness to the world, kindness to ourselves, kindness to our neighbor, kindness within a community. It's part of my hostility to social media is that it really rewards unkindness and punishes by ignoring it acts of kindness so that I think any activity that”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the original sins of a lot of 20th century conservation was that it really just saw the people who lived there as antagonists rather than as partners, voices that should be heard, voices that should be uppermost, in fact. And all of these things actually then often will contribute to the resilience of a community in terms of, say, if you're doing reforestation in the Andes, well, the glaciers are retreating. The Andes are going to be drawing out. How do you prevent that? Well, you start putting the forest back on the slopes of the Andes. Those forests will actually regulate and keep the streams flowing year-round, things like that. So if you look around, there are groups that are doing work that has a distinct climate benefit, but also has a human benefit and a biodiversity benefit. So probably, you know,”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some conservation initiatives that manage to check all the boxes. There are some very good groups that are doing forest preservation and reforestation. There are a lot of groups that are planning trees, but trees have to be planted right. It's not a matter of, okay, yeah, you're going to plant a billion trees. How are you going to do that and how are you going to make sure that they survive? They're not cut down for firewood and all that. But there do exist groups that check all the boxes. They're in fact creating carbon sinks in the form of either preserving or creating more forest and other kinds of plant life that are also necessarily helping biodiversity. They're sensitive to the needs of the local communities because a lot of these projects will be in more tropical areas.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responding according to various metrics, which I will not bore you with. But I think that's because, well, you can't go out into the world. But you know what? The world still will come to you. There will be a dragonfly or a robin that comes and you get the sense, I don't know if it's consoling, but I think it is a way everyone is so isolated now. And there is this way to connect with something outside yourself, outside your screen. If you literally, if you just step out the door, almost anywhere you are.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you can't go to Antarctica, you can't really go anywhere. And I think the personal encounters with little things in their neighborhood have become all the more important. Because I'm involved in bird conservation, I've seen the numbers. There are metrics for this. People are much, much more interested in birds now than they were 12 months ago. I mean, it's like... A 30% jump in the number of people who are”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm all in favor of energy conservation, renewable energy when it takes other factors into account, absolutely. What you don't want is the green continent that the European Union is trying to create, which is a green continent that got a lot of wind farms and solar farms, but no insects. It's like you call yourself green. I mean, Europe is the brownest continent in the world. And yet, and just because you manage to achieve carbon neutrality in emissions doesn't mean you have actually made yourself a green continent. You might, in fact, make yourself a brown continent.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sadly yes, I am saying that, although one of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time in the natural world is that it is incredibly resilient. If given half a chance, ecosystems do adapt, they do try to survive. And the old line among the climate people was, well, why focus on the natural world? None of it's going to matter if we don't solve the climate problem. And my inversion of that is, well, If all you do is solve the climate problem and you turn the entire world into one alternative energy factory with no natural world left, what does it matter that you've solved the problem? You've killed the planet, starkly put, but there is something to that.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably too much to hope that large numbers of people are going to want to let that in until it's forced on them in some unpleasant form. But again, I'm just going back to XR. I am heartened by their approach, which is literally in Santa Cruz, the way you do it is you call a meeting, you say friends and family, Sunday afternoon I want to get together and talk about something with you. So to Andrew in Toronto, I could recommend that because there's some structure to it and there are ways to bring it up. I'm not an expert on that. I'm an expert in ways how not to bring it up.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. Most people do lead lives of quiet desperation, and one of the many obstacles to serious action on climate over the past few decades has been that I've already, you know, I'm just trying to work two jobs and pay off my student loan, that kind of thing. It's like, I just don't have room in this for my life, a room for this in my life.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I'm in the place I am is that I read, I looked at the numbers, I happened to know climate scientists, and I also know how different they sound in private than they do in public. Privately, they're like, we're fucked. And publicly, it's like, it's important that we all get on board with the Paris Accord.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one way I do it. Well, I do it. I've made many friends unhappy at a certain point in a social evening by saying, hey, you know what? The gigatons continue to mount up. The feedback loops are already beginning to make themselves felt. It tends not to go over well if you do it in a social context. I think it's better to have it in a one-on-one way. One of my points of entry tends to be recommending a book or two that lay out why we should not be optimistic about our capacity to avert. And because I don't have all the facts at my fingertips, but I think”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that if you are trying to tell a human story about recognizable human beings, you're constrained. I don't write speculative fiction. I write about the here and the now. And I have a stake in the continuing availability of imaginative spaces where people can have recognizably human stories unfolding. And I think that's maybe the point of connection. I also so appreciate being in a natural place. I don't mean pristine wilderness, just some place where there is wild nature, a sense of Here, life is ongoing and it's fascinating. And that's, yeah, I think that's the point.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Novels are about people, and I can't write a novel if I don't love the people in it. So there's a natural tension there, I would say, every once in a while, yeah, because I know a little bit about how conservation works, I thought, all right, I'm out of job descriptions for this character. Why don't I make him a conservationist? I actually know something about that. I don't have to do voluminous research. Or every once in a while there's a little thing I'm worried about whether it is the damage done by the invasive species of domestic cats in the United States. I'll throw that in, hoping people won't be too mad at me for doing a little tiny bit of activism for a few pages. But no, I would say they are kind of separate projects. Maybe the only common thread would be going back to your notion of conservatism small C.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they come from really different places. It's difficult to go around through the world as it is now and not feel a little bit as Walter did in freedom. This race is this species is a cancer on the planet. We're basically, this is the bacterium that has taken over the entire Agar field in the petri dish. And it's kind of just, there is something cancerous about the expansion of human dominion over the planet. And necessarily if you care about other species, the human project seems kind of dubious. Whereas for a novelist,”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For having to leave the world yourself was the notion, yeah, this is the way it's always been and this is the way it always will be. So for me, unfortunately, I have to actually answer no. I had ways of dealing with my own mortality, and they had to do with, yes, but another generation will come up behind me. And I'm trying to do my little thing to make things better for people later. I'm trying to do what I can for people now. That was this nice closed system. And when you suddenly have to confront the possibility that, no, it's not going to go on the way it always has. In fact, there could be a complete end. There could be a human extinction even. I find that makes it a lot worse. That's a level of grief I hadn't had to prepare for. I've only really started to in the last few years when I've paid more attention. To the climate numbers.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of have the opposite feeling, which was that life is better now in many ways than for most of human history, even with the pandemic. Life is better. We live longer, we eat better globally. We still got a lot of problems, but there are fewer hungry people now than there have been for many decades as a percentage. One consolation, when the world was steady, which is the title of a wonderful title of a wonderful Claire Massude novel, when the world was steady, which is to say when people hadn't taken over the whole world, you were kind of in your own place and life continued in this way, in the same way it pretty much had for your grandparents or your great-grandparents. The consolation for, or I would say almost the consolation”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important to try, and yeah, I would give a shout out to a group like Extinction Rebellion because, yes, XR has programs and admirably a dual program, both to call public attention to the climate crisis, but also to call attention to the extinction crisis. But as a matter of process, the various XR chapters really are about gathering together with friends and processing the truth. Because your first response to it is fear, denial, flight. And then you grieve. But then after you grieve, you're still around and there's still things to do. I think that's the progression that I believe the culture is going to go in in the Coming years as the truth really starts to sink in more widely.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has that same kind of terminal diagnosis hanging over it? And there are certain kinds of conversations, certain kinds of experiences you want to have when you know that something is not going to be around forever. I just got an email from a friend whose mother had died, and he was talking about she'd struggle with cancer for the last couple of years. And it became, and she became a different person, actually my own mother became a kind of different person. She was done with certain kinds of judgment. She was done with worrying what other people thought. She wanted to do this, have this experience, see these people, be with the people she loved. And yeah. And that doesn't actually happen until you let in, really fully let in the mortality of what you're dealing with.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I've got a leaden tongue, but so you're told at a certain point in your life you realize, oh, I really am going to die. And sometimes that's not until you get a terminal diagnosis. Sometimes it's just getting older. But what is the, when you realize, oh, this isn't going to be, I'm not going to be around much longer. What do you do? It's precisely that. Yes, you might want to leave some kind of legacy for your grandchildren, but you want to surround yourself with people you love and you want to, or if somebody you know has dying, just because that person is dying doesn't mean you say, well, no more loving that person. You kind of redouble the commitment to that living actual relationship with the thing. And, of course, the strange time we live in now is that the planet as a whole, this lovely, familiar planet,”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would come at it from a slightly different angle. Of course, that was beautifully put, and that was actually a transcript of what he said.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think people are already pretty well discouraged from doing anything. And maybe getting the message through, you know what? This is really, really dire rather than pretending, oh, well, you know, in another 10 years, maybe we'll have fixed some things and it'll all be okay. Action will begin with an honest recognition of the scale of the problem.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's the dark comedy of having been told now for 20 years that we still have 10 years to solve this problem. The flip side of that kind of overly rosy presentation, we can do it if we just sign more international accords and vow to make certain changes by 2050. overly optimistic presentation of the severity of the problem, it leads to a certain cynicism on the part of the public, I think. Well, wait a minute, you said 10 years ago that we still only had 10 years, and now you're saying we have that again. If you're faced with any huge problem, the first thing you have to do is be honest about the nature of the problem. And I know, yes, I've taken heat from activists who say, well, you're just going to discourage people from doing anything.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be messed with lightly. And that old small sea conservatism, which is, you know, don't mess everything up in your attempt to radically solve everything in one swoop. So I'm with you there, Matthew.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It creates a kind of cultural madness, and you see it in many instances, and I would say the assault on the U.S. Capitol a couple of weeks ago was a sense of this, everything has to be completely torn down because there's this massive blah, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, you know what? It's actually kind of nice to have a functioning representative of the city of government. Do you really want to put that in the hands of people toting automatic weapons? So, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, conservatism obviously as a political, I consider myself a progressive politically and yet I also am aware of how fragile structures are. And those are social structures, but also ecological structures. And obviously the planet as a whole, climate turns out to be a very fragile thing.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think that's part of the building storm of shocks. I think we've suddenly found ourselves like we've run off the edge of the cliff, but we haven't started falling yet. And there's this sense of panic. And when you are panicked, you feel like, well, we have to change everything radically. And this, I mean,”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even have to be the natural world. It doesn't have to be a plant or an animal. It can be some aspect of the social order that you love and think is worth preserving, especially given that we're going to be getting these shocks. Find something you care about and do something about. And that is the antidote to this sort of despair and inaction, I think.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, if we pay more attention to that, we might actually have some very concrete specific reason, not the abstraction of, oh, what are the grandchildren, what kind of world are the grandchildren going to have? Because I don't know the grandchildren, even if I had them, even if I had a chance of having them, which I won't, I would still never know them. I wouldn't love them. But if you step outside and you go to some little speck of open space that's still there and still has organisms completing their lifestyle in it, you actually might care about that and you might be moved to do something in a way you're not going to be by this big abstraction, which the big abstraction of climate change, which in point of fact no individual can do a damn thing about. So there's no way to make a personal difference, no way to connect emotionally with it. And I keep wanting to say, like, let's find something.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, love is really critical, and I speak from my own experience. I had basically I started out as somebody who was Could have even imagined a career in environmental activism. And it just made me angry and kind of sick and despairing. And so I just walked away from it. And it was only when I came to birds and started caring about them and caring about the places where they lived that I had a reason to go back and start fighting again. And part of my critique of the way the fight against climate change in the public space has played out in the past 30 years is that it has been motivated by fear and by guilt and with not great results to show for it in terms of the world making radical changes in order to avert this catastrophe. And meanwhile, the natural world continues ever further to recede.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe we should be thinking about how to build our resilience in the face of those coming shocks, and that means social resilience as well as natural world resilience.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a new president, but really you look at those numbers and it's like that's going to solve the problem. Are you paying attention to what carbon emissions have done steadily for the past, well, 30 years? And have you paid attention to what the temperature is doing? It just seems like, hey, can we stop talking the language of saving the planet, solving the problem of climate change, and start to admit, things are going to get really, really bad. And when things get bad, then you say, well, what are our priorities? Yes, you can keep on trying to solve the unsolvable problem because that will have some moderating effect. But I think you need to change the terms of the conversation and say, look, this thing has gotten out of control. It's going to get way, way more out of control.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I'm saying anything so remarkable, and in the past few years I've had more and more company in saying, just look at the numbers. When have we ever underperformed in terms of heating up the planet? All of these projections of where we would be in 2010, 2020, we've exceeded that. You look pretty much at any measure melting of the Arctic ice water flow in Greenland, release of methane into the atmosphere from Arctic permafrost. All of these things are actually happening at an even faster rate than the doom criers were predicting 25 years ago. And meanwhile, you have, yes, you have the Paris Accord, and I apologize as an American for belonging to a country that elected President Trump, who took us out of that accord. Now we're back in it.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has many moving parts. There is the oceans, there is the tropical rainforest. There are wetlands. There are many, many aspects of it. And each of those component parts actually consists of problems that you have some hope of solving. So I've taken it upon myself to say, hey, can we, while working on the problem of climate change, even though it's kind of a lost cause at this point, can we also perhaps expand our notion of what it means to be green?”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had become focused almost solely on climate. And indeed, if you were green, it was enough that you cared about reducing carbon emissions, end of story. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of a mass extinction event, and that extinction event is proceeding apace. And so far, the drivers have little to do with climate change. So I've taken it upon myself to say, you know what? Something else is going on here. And even though it's critical, yes, that we reign in our emissions, do what we can to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. The fact is we've failed to solve that problem. We had 30 years, we failed. The cat's out of the bag, as it were. But meanwhile, the biodiversity crisis precedes apace.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, my mind is completely freezing up for the short version. I have a narrative version, which is that I became interested in conservation by way of becoming interested in birds. I started as kind of a selfish pleasure, but it didn't take a lot of reflection to realize that these birds I was looking at actually need to have a place to live and to breed and complete their life cycle. It became imperative that we pay attention to conservation because there is this natural world beyond our man-made world. And at a certain point, I began to hear from a lot of people in conservation their frustration that the entire conversation about the environment”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, the two-minute version. First of all, thank you to everyone who's come tonight. It's a wonderful morning here in Santa Cruz. It's our first real good rain since last April. And it's been, yeah, so things have been kind of climatically weird. Normally this is the season when we get our rain that has to last all year. Normally it starts in late October and here it is at the end of January. It's finally starting. So that's the backdrop. Yeah.”
2021-08-10 · Intelligence Squared · Stop Pretending We Can Save the Planet, with Jonathan Franzen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source