Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part two of two.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30 ] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show today. We present part two of our interview with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. He's among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His recent research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding [00:01:00 ] and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In part two of the interview Norgaard talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. He also shares his thoughts on sustainability co-evolution and confronting a change in climate. 

Speaker 4:        You've been very interested in them multi-disciplinary collaborative research model. Yeah, this is true. I've had very interesting experiences working in groups with people who think very differently [00:01:30 ] and I don't know when it starts. I guess probably the first project was a Ford Foundation funded project where eight or nine of us from different disciplines were set up as an Alaska pipeline team in 1970 the summer of 70 and we spent the summer talking to pipeline engineers to state officials, federal officials, scientists in the area, wildlife management people, native Americans, the Eskimo [00:02:00 ] about what's going on and as a team we tried to assess what's really the potential of [inaudible] Bay oil field for the state of Alaska and what are the myths, how do we break those myths and try to come up with a better understanding. Shortly after I came to Berkeley, Robert Vandenbosch from biological control entomology came into my office and said, we need an economist to work on pesticide use, and I didn't know anything about pesticide use other than what I'd read in silence swing by Rachel Carson and I [00:02:30 ] had an incredible experience working with Vandenbosch, Carl Huffaker, many, many anthropologists, but rather quickly. 

Speaker 4:        Also just because there weren't other economists doing it. Found myself on a presidential advisory committee working with the council on environmental quality on pesticide policy, a working on on 19 University National Science Foundation Integrated Pest Management Project. And you get out in the field, you talked to farmers, [00:03:00 ] end up talking to the pesticide industry people and you learn a lot and you try to assemble it and try to change how things are working. So early in my career I got very involved with these interdisciplinary activities, but the, the strongest experience was just joining the knowledges, being on national academy committees with the former president of Stanford University whose names Donald Kennedy, a tremendous scientist that was able to work across [00:03:30 ] scientific fields with other people. But I was seen scientists involved in collective understanding or using their judgment together to try to say, this is what science can say and this is what society probably should do given what we know. 

Speaker 4:        But it was a judgment process. It wasn't that there was a great big computer model that put all of our understanding together. And have you seen that process improving over time? I think there's more people participating in processes [00:04:00 ] like that. And the intergovernmental panel on climate change is certainly a massive experiment along those lines. And the Millennium Ecosystem assessment was one of these, we're doing it more. What we're not doing is actually teaching undergraduate students and graduate students that this is how science works when it really comes to understanding complex systems. It's a matter of getting in a room together and talking a lot and bringing your knowledges together. [00:04:30 ] And then that raises new questions that we can go back and study and do deeper research in small teams of maybe interdisciplinary or maybe it's strictly disciplinary, but it's that does my knowledge fit together with this other person's knowledge? 

Speaker 4:        And if not, what does it mean? And if it does, great, you know, science does not come together. And if it did, who would know, who would be smart enough to know and how would we know that person knew? And so there's a great problem, you got to do it together [00:05:00 ] and we're not teaching that yet. I think the energy and resources group does, but it's not quite as explicit or as open as it should be. And is that what makes that program so distinctive? Well, I tried to leave that mark on it and had the advantage of serving on the admissions committee. And certainly one of my criteria was to bring people to the program who had enough experience to have a sense of identity [00:05:30 ] and a sense of voice, experiential knowledge that they could bring to the group, but also to not just take the most brilliant students we could find on the list that best matched the interest of the professors, but to actually try to select 15 to 22 students who could learn together, who had different understanding, who had different disciplinary backgrounds or experiential knowledge. 

Speaker 4:        And so I literally tried to set it up as a shared learning to the extent I could. There's many people involved [00:06:00 ] in the, in the decision process, and of course the applicants this themselves have to say, yes, your best intentions are never carried out. But that was certainly an influence I tried to have. And to some extent did. And the book that you're working on now or I've just completed? Well, I just try authored a book, David Schlossberg and John Drysek. I have to say that they basically did most of the writing. We had try edited a handbook in Oxford Handbook on climate change in society [00:06:30 ] and so we decided we ought to build a write up a shorter book, a 200 page book that would be for lay people are educated obviously, but uh, a broader audience, a much broader audience. And the title of that is climate challenge society, right. And I [inaudible] wordpress. Yes. So I, I can say I contributed to the title climate challenge society and climate challenge in both ways that were having difficulty coming to grips with the concept of climate change. But we're also challenged [00:07:00 ] by the consequences of climate change and that books currently out. That book came out a couple of months ago. I have no idea how it's selling yet. I'm, I'm hopeful. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] spectrums. Brad Swift is interviewing Richard Norgaard and ecological economists. Next segment. He talks about the book that he's currently writing. 

Speaker 4:        [00:07:30 ] The book I'm writing now as the unusual title economism and the economy scene. And so elaborate on the first term economism. Uh, there's several ways to get into this, but you probably understand the difference between environmentalism and environmental science and that environmentalism is the movement. It draws on environmental science, but not as rigorously as it probably should. It doesn't mind using old [00:08:00 ] environmental science if that suits its purposes better. But environmentalism also feeds back on environmental science that environmental scientists needed speak to environmental ism environmentalist's and so they will choose words to speak to their public. We don't use the word economism. And the quickest way to say this, the difference between environmentalism and economism is that we don't use the word economism because there isn't any difference between economics and economists. [00:08:30 ] And they're kind of so tightly bound that we don't see the difference that, but economism is the beliefs we hold as a people. 

Speaker 4:        And those beliefs help keep the economy going there. The ideas that are invoked in political discourse. You can think of it as just like we think of environmentalism as only kind of a religious movement or a movement that brings people their social identity. Economism is similar in that way that our economic beliefs help rationalize where we are in the economy [00:09:00 ] or economic beliefs. Help rationalize allowing our corporations to use cheap labor abroad or economic beliefs. Sort of explain how the system we're in exists and why it's there. Almost everything in our lives on a daily basis and to understand that we have economism that intertwines with economic sciences. Economists themselves are engaged in this belief system in partly perpetrating it and [00:09:30 ] partly changing it. So that's the nature of the next book, the second term as econo scene and he wrote a familiar, many of them audience would be familiar with the idea of the Anthropocene, the idea that we're now in a new geological era, an era in which people are the primary drivers of environmental change, and that's controversial among the scientific community, but it's begun to be used quite a bit. 

Speaker 4:        And anthropocene to me is very vague. It doesn't [00:10:00 ] identify what it is. It's doin