Following the evidence: A conversation with Fred Pearce
Bea Gilbert spoke to journalist Fred Pearce about reporting on a changing world, why we should move on from environmental nostalgia, and why there is still cause for hope.
Fred is a London-based freelance environment journalist, reporting from more than 80 countries over more than 40 years. He currently writes regularly online for Yale environment360. His many books include Despite it All, When The Rivers Run Dry, A Trillion Trees, The New Wild, The Landgrabbers and Confessions of an Ecosinner.
Bea Gilbert: What environmental topics interest you the most at the moment, and what will your next book be on?
Fred Pearce: The book I got out a few months ago and am currently doing book festivals for is called Despite It All: A Handbook for Climate Hopefuls. I’m trying to interrogate ways of being realistic about the dreadful problems that we have created and are still creating, and a sense of not optimism, but of hope. It is basically about finding realistic solutions.
The book is short – I tend to find my bad news books are long and my good news books are short – but it’s an attempt to find things that do work, and things that might be expected to work. This includes technical fixes, which get a bad reputation from environmentalists but are fundamental to solving many of our problems, and do solve our problems – we can see that very clearly in the way that renewable energy now has a really good tailwind economically as much as politically. Tech is not solving all of our problems, and it’s not to say that we won’t hit climate tipping points and dreadful weather and all sorts of scary, genuine outcomes that I spend quite a lot of my time writing about. But we do have some answers. The question is about whether we adopt fixes, and whether we do so in time.
There are tipping points in the human system, and maybe we’ve now reached the point where solar power, in particular, is going to take over energy systems. We won’t be reliant on fossil fuel in the future; I think that’s becoming increasingly clear now, but it doesn’t mean we won’t have gone through some of the tipping points, like shutting down the Gulf Stream or triggering catastrophic loss of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, which we may have already triggered.
Some of the things people are scared of may now be unstoppable. But even so, we have to find a way out of our reliance on fossil fuels, and there are some political fixes around how we manage systems. I get some confidence from the fact that nature is very resilient. Ecosystems and species are adaptable and are designed to be adaptable. They’ve evolved for millions of years, and they will find ways – whether new species come in, or ecosystems move wholesale with climate zones, and whether this will be good or bad for us – nature does find ways. At that level, I have hope because of the resilience in the system.
BG: Has there been anything in your career that has maintained your interest above other topics?
FP: I move around a lot to keep me interested and explore new areas, tending to focus on the books I’m doing at any one time. One thing I keep coming back to, though, is water issues. The very first book I did was on the British water industry, and I’ve looked at water from a global perspective over the years. I wrote a book called When the Rivers Run Dry, which was revised and updated in 2018. Water issues keep coming back and rising up the agenda. River management and wetlands tend to be underreported generally, so I also write about them because not too many other people do.
The other big topic is climate change. When I first started as a journalist, it wasn’t really an issue we talked about. We’d report on acid rain, polluted rivers, dirty beaches – more local issues. Since the 1990s, climate change has been way up the top of the agenda, and it constantly gives; I’ve written more about climate change than anything else for a long time, and I have several books on it. The science keeps moving on, and I do tend to annoy scientists because I tell them they should shut up a bit, and it needs to be a conversation involving many more kinds of people. We can’t afford to sideline climate change as an 'environment issue' or a 'science issue' and then just ask science to ‘solve it'. It needs to involve technologists, playwrights, clerics, lawyers, and novelists. We just need more and more people talking about it in more and more contexts to get the grip on people that it still needs to achieve. Science has done a brilliant job on climate change. It has kept the issue alive and brought it to the fore, and it’s not an obvious thing that people can see front and centre in their day-to-day lives. But it’s remained on the agenda for a long time.
When I first wrote about wind power back in 1992, it was literally a couple of turbines on hills in California. Solar power was being developed for use in space. It was still vastly expensive. And nobody talked about electric vehicles because we didn’t have batteries that could do the job, so it wasn’t even being discussed. Back then, China was thinking about it rather hard, and it’s now reaping the benefits.
But really, we’ve come a long way, not only in developing the technology itself. Bringing down the cost by orders of magnitude has made it the go-to for the energy system. This is all good. But I still think we need to broaden it into all aspects of our lives. We need to talk to climate scientists about letting other people get involved. I hate turning up to meetings with a panel of people there to talk about climate change, and they’re all scientists. This year, I’ve done a couple of sessions where diplomats, medics and engineers have come to the fore. As an environment journalist, as a science journalist, climate has been front and centre of my work for over 30 years now.
BG: I'd like to go back to you being a climate hopeful. You cover the concept of a ‘Good Anthropocene’ in your Handbook. Could you outline that?
FP: We have a choice. We can either trash the planet even more and take it beyond tipping points, from which life will get more and more difficult, or we can make accommodations with what we know about how the Earth system works, and with nature’s ability to restore itself. That involves rethinking our relationship with nature and our overinflated sense of our own importance. I think it’s happened – the speed is now the matter – but the way we talk about nature, pollution, climate and other threats to our systems has come on a lot in my time. There’s a sense of pushback in politics at the moment, and I don’t dismiss that, but I suspect it’s a byway and we’re going to get back on the main track. We certainly need to. Environmentalists often – not unreasonably – talk about the Anthropocene as the worst possible outcome. Humans controlling the planet and trashing it. I think we have to think more positively. Yes, humans dominate many of the planetary systems. We dominate land use, we dominate how and where species can thrive. We have to find ways of doing it responsibly. A lot of that is about technology, economics, politics, philosophy; how we think about ourselves in the world.
I’ll often say at public meetings that we need optimists and pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems, and optimists to point out the solutions.
BG: As a journalist you have to convince readers about the level of risk and urgency without making the challenges we face appear impossible. You’ve reported on the environment long enough to see some predictions over time not come into fruition – the population bomb, for example. How has this affected the way you communicate certainty, and how do you balance this with the imperative of convincing readers?
FP: For a long time, we’ve had a lot of presumptions about the environment. My job as a journalist is to pick through them and ask how certain we are about things; I have to ask what is real. I interrogate things that are a ‘given’ in debates. For example, are alien species and the movement of species around the world always a bad thing? Or is it part of nature’s response to changes we’ve introduced, and therefore a sign of a vigorous natural system that can adapt, evolve and respond, rather than just being destroyed?
Way back, I looked at the very simplified notions we had around desertification: that we’re turning the world into desert, and that this was because of bad pastoral management in arid ecosystems. But very often, people working pastures in arid lands know rather better how to manage their grassland and pastoral resources than outsiders do. Some of the simple explanations for desertification – ‘overgrazing’ was the word for a while – have been proved rather wrong. I also question whether we want to reforest the planet and set to planting, or whether we stand back and let nature do the restoration itself. Hopefully, that can form a useful part of the debate about how we do reforestation.
The evidence of climate change is firstly basic science and secondly exemplified as the world passes through time. Sometimes the effects don’t materialise in ways we expect; some relatively arid areas are becoming greener because of CO2 fertilisation effects. I think that sometimes, climate scientists ignore that, though ecologists likely know about it.
I try to stay honest, and I try not to take anything for granted. I explore assumptions and see if they really stand up. I don’t see myself as an advocate so much as interrogating and then engaging in the political context as well. I go where the evidence takes me.
BG: You’ve talked about nature finding a way and evolving, questioning what we position as ‘unnatural’ and whether change is always bad. Your photographic book – Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World – made me think about how our baseline for ‘then’ is eternally liable to shift. ‘Then’ might mean the earliest day of satellite imagery, or the common pegging of pre-Industrial Revolution, or even just the limits of personal memory and nostalgia. You’ve cautioned against environmental nostalgia, but is there a state we should be aiming to return to, or otherwise aim for in the future?
FP: I don’t think trying to go back is a good idea. Our understanding of ecology has changed quite a lot. We used to have ideas about ‘perfected ecosystems’, ‘climax ecosystems’, ‘pristine ecosystems’ and so on. Most of these turned out to be largely not true – most of the Amazon has been heavily used by people, particularly in pre-Colombus times, until the Europeans turned up and decimated local populations; people retreated somewhat, and the forests came back. What we see in tropical rainforests is often regrowth from various human actions of the past. The other point is that ecosystems are constantly evolving. Species are coming and going on a regular basis, even in relatively unchanged ecosystems. So, the sense of ‘climax ecosystems’ has given way to a much more dynamic natural environment. One in which humans are big players.
That takes us on to thinking afresh about how nature responds to what we’re doing and gives us a sense that nature can respond and change. But it also means we shouldn’t aspire to go backwards –the climate is unlikely to go back, not to mention the soils and lands and forests we’ve destroyed, which will hopefully come back in different forms. We can be gardeners and try to recreate what was there at some moment in the past, and for some people that will be pre-Industrial, for others it’ll be mid-20th Century, or the height of the Holocene 5,000 years ago. None of these gardening ideas are really possible. What I think we should be doing is giving nature its head. Giving space for natural systems and allowing nature to do what it does best: change.
The whole idea which underpins a lot of ecological science is that change is bad. Honestly, I think this is fundamentally flawed. Of course, we shouldn’t gratuitously mess with the environment; nature will not cope with everything, but we should be thinking of ways to maximise nature’s ability to move on and adapt, rather than constraining it by trying to put it into a straitjacket of moving backwards, which is an arbitrary construct. The big picture is that we can’t manufacture large stable ecosystems – they constantly move on, and should, and that’s to be applauded rather than be frightened of.
BG: Finally, do you think the increasing politicisation of environmental policy has changed the nature of environmental reporting in the media?
FP: I have certainly been seeing less about the environment and climate, which is odd, because actually, it’s a more contentious issue under populist pushback. But also, this means that many editors might find the contentiousness less straightforward to deal with.
Overall, there’s been a change over my career. It fluctuates. There was a time when the BBC was criticised for giving equal time to climate sceptics, and they gave up on that. But we’re almost coming back to a point where climate scepticism is trying hard to get re-embedded in the conversation internationally. Wherever there are economic pressures, there are always pressures to do less to protect the environment. That’s part of the political conversation – people still have a sense of ‘it’ll be very expensive to fix climate change, and how can we possibly afford it, especially if no one else is doing it, and China is building power stations left right and centre. What’s the point?’ That narrative certainly comes through, but it’s far adrift from reality, particularly when looking at renewable energy in most contexts, including in the developing world.
I’ve been writing this week about India. Ten years ago, it was turning up at climate conferences and telling the rich world, "How dare you tell us not to burn coal; it’s the cheap way of developing our economy; we’re poor countries and we have to do this." But India is now scaling back on building coal-fired power stations and is a frontrunner in developing solar power on an astounding scale, even more so than in China. It’s now economics as much as anything else. In the tropics, it’s now cheaper to develop solar power and wind power.
So, economics is now somewhat adrift from the politics. We now find that Trump has been trying to pay American utilities not to develop wind power, when they wanted to do it because it’s cheaper – bizarre. China and India are the largest industrial nations, and they are hellbent on developing and exploiting renewable energy. China is exporting it around the world, incorporating it into its aid strategies, and so on. To stand back from that is to deny that what’s happening means that Trump’s policies may well reduce American influence.
Energy demand is increasing very fast because we’re electrifying the world: data centres, electric transport. But CO2 emissions are not increasing in step because renewables are taking up extra demand. This is still not an answer, because we have to get back to net zero – or something like it – by mid-century if we’re going to hold off some of the worst climate impacts. But it does suggest that we’re moving onto the right track. We’ve just got to accelerate.
Header image: © zhu difeng | AdobeStock
