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This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott. Airspace is clear. John Chertea is in what he calls his flying car. He takes off nearly vertically from a field in Milton, Delaware.
It's a black and white aircraft that looks like a cross between a huge drone and a vintage World War I fighter plane. It's called Blackfly, one of just five operating in the United States.
John's daughter Heather is on the ground and chats with her dad using a pink walkie-talkie. Okay, he's up to 40 feet. Joy, stick forward. Looking good. Okay, we'll see ya.
John is flying over a busy highway, and the flying car is bound to create a stir. Okay, so he's heading up Route 1 now, so there'll probably be a bunch of UFO sightings reported to the police. Uh-oh, here we go. There have been so many sightings in Jersey, everyone thinks we're some sort of alien nation or something. John is 86. He is a retired housing developer who has flown planes for nearly 70 years.
And he loves nothing better than showing off this new toy, which costs about $200,000. This is the future of aviation. There's nothing like it. The Blackfly is about the size of a compact car, but it weighs only about 350 pounds. It doesn't need a runway, and it lifts off and lands going basically straight up and down. Eight propellers are powered by battery-charged motors.
It can head speeds of 62 miles an hour, hover in mid-air, and fly backwards too. I'm flying it with a joystick that has the controls on it. Nothing on the floor, no rudder pedals, no other controls other than the joystick, like a game, like a gaming board. And in front of me is an iPad, and that iPad has all the information. How high I am, how fast I'm going, what my motor temperatures are, what my battery level is.
Those batteries need to be recharged after 20 minutes or so. But John says even with that limitation and the fact that it's not going all that fast, this flying car could still be very useful. The purpose of these someday will be for the executive that lives there
an hour and a half drive from his office. But yet he might be only 20 minutes away on a flight that flies at 50 to 60 miles an hour. And that's what will become very popular someday. And there'll be a bunch of these in the air. John believes there is a flying car revolution ahead, and he's excited to be part of it.
We've been flying it since August and having a blast with it. Made a lot of new friends, really interesting people who are interested in aviation and agree with us that this is the wave of the future.
The wave of the future. It sounds great, right? But people have thought for decades that flying cars were just around the corner. An early version of a flying car was certified in the U.S. in the 1950s. They were amazing designs. They basically took planes and just smushed them into cars.
And the fact that they managed to make that work is, you know, it's a feat of engineering. It's impressive. That's science and tech journalist Nicole Kobe. She says those early flying cars were not very practical, though. You couldn't really do any of the fun things you'd want to do, like take off from your own home and things like that. And they were really, really expensive.
So I'm not sure it's really the dream of the flying car that you probably have in mind, like the Blade Runner or the Jetsons. So I could have had a very bad flying car. They were very much, they flew like planes, which meant you had to go to an airport or an airfield to take off. And if you're trying to do this to improve your commute, having to drive all the way to the airport first and then go doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
We often think of the future as something brand new, something that will emerge in a few years, a few decades, fueled by a sudden breakthrough. But usually, whatever we think of as the future has been in the works for a long time, pushed forward little by little by an army of innovators and tinkerers. On this episode, what it takes to create the future and how we can shape our destiny.
To get started, let's stick with Nicole Kobe. Her new book is called The Long History of the Future. Why tomorrow's technology still isn't here. She writes about all kinds of innovations that people were sure would be commonplace by now, from bionic humans to hyperloops and smart cities and flying cars.
Talk a little bit more about who came up with these very early versions of flying cars and why. What was their impetus? There was such a range of people working on these. It was everything from, you know, kind of home inventors, people who had some engineering skills and were just interested in the idea, all the way through to people who were more accustomed to developing and designing things for the military. But there was this belief, you know, kind of post-war in the 50s that
that there was a lot of people coming back that had pilot's licenses and that this was a very modern kind of optimistic view of what the US was going to become. People would be able to fly to get to their jobs or live wherever they wanted and just fly into the city and that sort of thing. There was even a competition to try to get the price of private planes down to kind of the $500 or $700 mark just to make it everybody has a car and then their second vehicle is a plane.
And none of this worked. You know, it just didn't, pardon the pun, but it didn't take off at all. These things just weren't really affordable. It's not really sensible. And people didn't really want to spend their money this way. And then the economy started to contract and all of this kind of got forgotten about.
I guess early on they were so expensive that you could have bought a plane and a car for the same price. Yeah, the very first one that was really certified as a car and as a plane, you know, you could take it on the road, you could take it in the air without getting in any trouble, was a car called the Aero Car. And it was designed by a guy named Moulton Taylor. And his aim was to mass produce these, to maybe get even 500 of them made, which probably would have bought the price down.
But they only ended up making about six or seven of them. And to buy one, it was going to cost you like $15,000. And in the 50s, for $2,000, you could buy yourself a very nice car. And for $2,000, you could buy yourself a plane. So that leaves you quite a bit of money left over in order to have this machine that isn't great at flying, isn't great at driving.
So I think that they kind of made it, the price was a bit too high. Now, the Aero car was this dinky little cute car. Look, it looks like a toy. You know, it wasn't like a luxury product. It was a great idea, but it was just very, very overpriced. If you wanted to have a car, drive to the airport and take off, you could do that for, you know, a third of the price, less than a third of the price. I want to ask about the vision here, because this is something that I felt like kept coming up in your book.
that sometimes we just have the wrong idea. Like a flying car to me just doesn't really make sense because if I can fly, I'm never going to drive again because what's the point, right? And it sometimes seems like when people try to iterate a future version of something, they just kind of go down the wrong path.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the thing with flying cars. Some people want them just because they sound fun and it's a fantasy. We kind of have a set vision of it in science fiction of how neat it would be and how it would be faster and freeing. But I mean, personally, I don't like driving anywhere anyway. So the idea of having to drive in the air just sounds really stressful to me. It sounds like it's something that would be very, very hard. Even if it was completely automated, it would be a bit scary. Other people obviously feel differently about it.
But when it comes to, you know, if we want to come up with a way to end traffic, if we're actually trying to solve a problem here with these, there are better ways to solve traffic. You know, public transportation, getting more buses out there, that sort of thing would have a bigger impact on traffic. You know, just changing our working patterns has such a huge impact on traffic. If people aren't going into the office every day, that cuts traffic a huge amount. So there's just a lot more simple solutions to these problems now.
rather than trying to build these machines that we might never be able to build. But on the flip side, some people just find them very exciting. So, you know, there's one guy that I interviewed for the book named Paul Moeller, and he's just spent his entire life trying to make flying cars a reality. He has an idea of what the design should be, and he just spends all of his money that he has ever made into trying to make this work. And so far, he hasn't succeeded, really. You know, he's managed to take off, but that's about it.
And he's doing it just because he's compelled by the idea. He finds it interesting. And I think that's one of the great things about engineering. Sometimes it's trying to solve a problem and sometimes it's just for, you know, just to see if you can do it. You know, it's almost like exploring.
Did you learn anything about the design process and what it takes for people to really envision something and to get away from what we already have and come up with something totally new? I'm thinking, for example, about robots, where we've often envisioned them as looking like us, which really doesn't make any sense for them to look like us. Why would they?
Yeah, I think if you were trying to build a robot butler, the first thing you would do is to try to build something that looked like a person, which, as you say, doesn't make a whole lot of sense because I have a very small living space. I don't know where another person would fit, you know, another robot that's human sized would fit and where we would put it. So then when it comes to building a robot to, say, clean your floors, a lot of people would immediately start trying to just automate a vacuum cleaner.
They would picture a vacuum and they would start trying to automate it, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense either because you don't need it to look like a traditional vacuum. And I think it's something that a lot of people probably aren't capable of doing. You know, like I can't just imagine, completely imagine what a flying car should look like. You just picture a car with wings and that's what they were building in the 50s, you know, it was literally a car with a plane stuck on top of it in some cases.
So to come up with something like a Roomba, like an actual robotic vacuum, and it's just a little flat round thing that goes around, and that's just the shape it needs to be because that makes more sense for it to navigate well, and that's a good size for it and all that sort of thing. Sometimes it's a design thing and having a good sense of what is appealing to people. And sometimes it's just breaking an idea down to what it needs to be and then kind of rebuilding from there.
If you knew how to build a robotic vacuum and you kind of thought about all of the elements and pieces that you need, and you could kind of picture sort of what the, you know, the minimum requirements were, you could kind of build from there. Instead of picturing a human holding a vacuum and trying to work down from there, you kind of have to just start from a completely clear slate.
I think that that is a very truly difficult thing to do. You know, this is why so many, you know, so-called flying cars end up looking like a car with wings. You know, if you are actually going to build a flying car, you should figure out how to make a small thing fly before you start trying to, you know, call it a flying car, trying to evoke a certain look, if that makes sense. So maybe start with the engineering first, figure out what is your minimum and then kind of go from there.
Yeah. So the question is more like, what is it that I want to create? What do I want it to do? And then think about what it should look like based on that.
Yeah, absolutely. And I was talking to Mark Rybert about this, and he's the kind of CEO and founder of Boston Dynamics, you know, the company that's very famous for the very kind of wild, different designs of robots. And they kind of put them all on YouTube doing crazy things. And sometimes it's very funny, and sometimes it's very scary.
And they were trying to come up with a robot that could move boxes from a shipping pallet onto a truck or vice versa, that sort of a thing. Because logistics is in a position at the moment where there's just not enough workers. And it's a very hard job to do. So it's a good thing to try to automate. It kind of makes sense. It's a tough job. It doesn't pay amazingly well. There's not enough people who want to do it, understandably. And they started using their Atlas robot, which is kind of human-shaped. And it's a very impressive design.
But it wasn't the best way to move a box because it sort of moved just like a slow human, which isn't very useful. And by the time that they kind of had developed their idea...
They had something that was essentially a box with a big arm on it. And the arm has a bunch of cameras and it can see different types of boxes. It can understand if one's about to fall. It can scan the information on the side to understand. It doesn't look anything at all like a person because it doesn't need to. It's just a robot with an arm. And I think there's a reason that so many of our
our factory and manufacturing robots end up as big boxes with arms because that's actually what we need you know they're very functional and then the rest of the time we're trying to build these humanoid things because we think well then it can it can stand next to people and it won't be so scary or be able to go upstairs and things like that
But that's not really what we need. You know, if we need a robot just to move boxes, let's just design one that can do that. I think one of the takeaway points from the book for me was that the future happens in very small increments, but we want it to happen with a big bang, right?
We want there to be something that we're like, oh, wow, we finally arrived. Meanwhile, there have been like a million little steps that have been incorporated in our lives that maybe we didn't even pay attention to, that we didn't even notice. So talk about some of those discoveries that you made in researching the book.
Yeah, there's this idea that technology kind of happens overnight or there's like a sudden breakthrough that enables something. And that does sometimes happen. But all of this is, you know, it's very long term projects. It's, you know, with something like AI, you know, we're talking about this a huge amount now because of generative AI and, you know, all of the advances that have happened lately. Yeah.
But the idea of machines being able to learn and to, you know, quote unquote, think, you know, that goes back to the 1920s and the 1930s. Like we're coming up on a hundred years of talking about this. If you think about it from a philosophical standpoint, it goes even further back. You know, and that's before we had computers really. So then we had to build computers to try to build these things. And then people who were first trying to make the idea of artificial intelligence into something, you
They were working with the big room-sized machines that were very slow and very expensive and couldn't really do all that much. And we're slowly kind of coming to a point where maybe we've caught up enough with the computing hardware to allow enough performance to actually start to achieve some of the things that we were talking about 100 years ago. And a lot of the ideas have been talked about throughout all that time, and we've kind of refined them.
some of the thinking, but we still actually have to build it. And building things is very, very difficult. So I think people feel like things happen very, very quickly. You know, everybody talks about the fast pace of technology. And a lot of things have really been accelerated by things like the internet and, you know, faster computing and much cheaper computing. But all of these things are very, very long in coming. Did you see any kind of lessons in the different stories that you looked into in terms of
What goes wrong when the future, quote, fails? Or, you know, what's amiss when something just doesn't catch on or isn't ready for prime time? Sometimes I think it's an engineering or a technical failure. And it doesn't mean that the people working on it have failed. It just means that it's not possible or it's not possible yet.
And, you know, writing this book, I kind of came across a lot of people who saw that. You know, they came up with an idea, they developed it, and they went, this isn't going to happen now. So one of the people I write about is a guy named Ivan Sutherland who created an augmented reality headset, like in the 60s, when the computers were not capable of any kind of real imaging system. So he just went on and did other things, you know, and it was several decades later that
When we're now talking, you know, when we have these headsets at home and we can actually do this kind of thing. If he had kept working on that his entire life, he would have just been a very, very frustrated man. So sometimes, sometimes it's waiting for technology to catch up. And then other times it just comes down to things like business model and, you know, what society wants and whether anybody's actually interested in using a product. How did he make those augmented reality headsets?
It was such an interesting project. They used a kind of a headset, a helmet, that was for helicopter pilots to be able to see underneath the helicopter when they were landing. So it was just, it was a camera connection. And all they did was take that hardware and instead of having a camera feeding in the image to the pilot...
they had a computer doing it. But at that point, computers were nothing like what we imagine them to be today. So their computing system was several disparate machines that all took on a different aspect of thinking about where the line needed to be, calculating how it would move, because you could actually go inside the shape that they were creating, like if they were trying to show you a cube or something like that. You could go inside it and manipulate it and things like that.
So it was just a lot of very complex maths. They had, you know, individual computers, computing hardware systems that were just analyzing all of this and they'd have to feed it into the machine and they had to do it fast enough so that, you know, they could do it at a high enough, you know, frame rate that it would work for humans and stuff like that.
And, you know, the actual hardware, the way that it looks on somebody's head is hilarious. I mean, it's very steampunk. It just, it looks, it looks terrifying. But it was a research project. They just wanted to know if they could. And they could, but it definitely wasn't going to be a commercial product anytime soon.
Yeah, I'm kind of picturing something out of Mad Max, maybe, or I don't know. Yeah, not far off it. Yeah. Wow. Pretty much that. In your conversations with engineers, innovators, people trying to come up with future ideas, how important is it for them to be able to pivot? Yeah.
I think that's really important because the thing with building something, if you're trying to build anything, I don't think there's really such an idea as failing. So if you're trying to build a technology, it doesn't matter what it is, and you put a bunch of effort into it and you get 70 or 80% of the way there and you realize it's not going to work, maybe it's not possible or it's just not going to work with the money that you have.
You should take what you've learned and you should apply it somewhere else. And we've come up with this idea of, you know, the pivot, you know, trying to apply that to something else. And it's a, you know, it's a great idea. But one of the people that I interviewed for the book is Google's head of their X Labs, which is their innovation labs. He's a guy named Astro Teller, and he has this idea of compost.
So they have all sorts of wild ideas that, you know, get developed there. And if the idea doesn't work, so it either isn't technically possible or they don't manage to pull it off or it's not commercially viable, then they just kind of take all of those ideas and just dump them into a pile and try to rework them or try to use the technologies in other ways.
It's just this idea that if you have learned something or you have built something, it is probably useful for something else, even if you're not sure what that is yet. So absolutely, I think a pivot is a perfect way of thinking about this. If you can't make a flying car, well, maybe you can use your technology to make something else. And the things that we kind of refer to as flying cars now, you know, the air taxis,
They're basically electric helicopters, but that's not necessarily a criticism. That's not a bad thing. An electric helicopter is a very good idea. You know, they'll be cheaper and they'll be quieter and have no operational emissions and things like that. Those are all things we would love for helicopters to be.
So if you tried to make a flying car and instead you just really improved helicopters, like I don't think that counts as a failure. That's a very strong pivot and something that's very useful for all of us. And I guess the idea with this compost terminology is that whatever this work is we did that didn't work out, it's not trash. It's fertilizer for something else. Absolutely. You might come up with something else that works. It might spark another idea. It might solve another problem for you that you don't even have yet.
So I think it's a really good way of thinking about things. I don't think any engineering work is ever really wasted. Even if all you find out is that this isn't possible, I mean, you've still learned something, right? That's science and tech journalist Nicole Kobe. Her new book is called The Long History of the Future. Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here.
Coming up, we'll hear from people whose job it is to predict the future. It's not looking into the crystal glass, but have a real, very good understanding of where things are moving. That's next on The Pulse. This message comes from Carvana. Sell your car the convenient way. Enter your license plate or VIN. Answer a few questions and get a real offer in seconds. Go to carvana.com today.
This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the future, the one we predict, the one we create, and the future that's already here. Welcome to the future.
It can feel like the future is a force that we're being swept toward, a different era powered by cutting-edge innovations and technologies. We think of life on distant planets, AI, super smart machines. Robots can free humans from the most repetitive and dangerous tasks. When Devon Powers asks her students to envision the future, that's the kind of thing that comes up.
Devin is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, and she focuses on trends and futures. But she tells her students that the future is always happening. You know, if you say, hey, let's have lunch tomorrow, you've technically thought about the future of your life.
If you save for retirement, you've technically thought about the future of your life. Or if you've ever made a plan for a vacation or a plan to marry your partner or anything like that, you've made a plan for the future. That future we might be able to predict, at least to some extent. But what about big picture stuff like robots or virtual reality? Big changes in culture, lifestyle and tastes?
There are people whose job it is to forecast those kinds of changes. How do they do that? Reporter Alan Yu picks it up from here. Devon Powers wrote a book about that industry. It's called On Trend, the business of forecasting the future. The idea to me that people would...
pay for understanding the future, it just blew my mind. I didn't realize that that was a thing that somebody could do. You can call it futurism or trend forecasting. It can be easy to roll your eyes at this. Like in this scene from the TV show Schitt's Creek, when a rich man, David Rose, loses his money and suddenly has to find a job. What kind of job are you looking for? Something in like art curating or trend forecasting.
Okay, um, hmm, let's see. Not seeing anything in art curating or trend forecasting. That's weird. Okay. Um, do you have any other skills or areas of expertise? Uh, I've been told I have really good taste. Oh, well, that's good. Um, let's see. Oh!
But trend forecasting is a serious business, and more of a science than fortune-telling. It involves studying the market to see what people already like, looking at what else is popular, and trying to figure out where the world could be in the future.
Sam Develaert is a futurist at a company called Harmony Labs. I was asked by a publishing company to understand what are the next topics in the self-help book category, for example.
Because a lot of companies have to bet on particular products, correct? So it's like identifying, wow, which racehorse do you think might be winning the race? And how can we identify that? You might think she'd dig into the existing canon of self-help books.
But instead, Sem looked elsewhere. I would look into music, into dancing stars, into hairstyles, into makeup trends, into architecture trends, etc., etc., etc. And when I see a common denominator, then I feel, OK, this might be the zeitgeist formula. Zeitgeist is a kind of mosaic. Fashion, movies, music,
colors, patterns, Sem tries to think about a lot of pieces. When Sem tries to put her finger on the zeitgeist, she always thinks about one surprising factor: what drugs are trending right now? You think about cocaine, you think, hmm, when was it that this drug was really, really, let's say, yeah, we spoke a lot about this drug? Around the 80s, correct? So what does cocaine create? It can create a
let's say bloated sense of self-confidence, it's extroversion, right? And what did we have in the 80s? It was an extroverted time. You had big hair, big shoulder pads, big bodies, right? Like muscles, unlike the 70s, right? It's no coincidence that cocaine was trending when the Mac Mansions were trending, when Terminator, Rumble were trending.
It may sound like she's naming random 80s stuff, but where we hear nostalgic buzzwords, she hears a pattern. To understand her approach, it helps to know that her background is in art history. First I studied art history, comparative religion and sociology in Germany and was very enamored with the 16th century Spanish art. Don't ask me why.
You could see correlations, particular periods of time have similar formulas that will translate cross-categorically. So the type of music would correspond, have a similar style to the type of architecture, to the fashion, to the mannerisms, to the food, etc., etc., etc. Her work is a little like art history, but in reverse.
Art history looks at the products of a certain culture and tries to think, what does this say about the culture? Trend forecasting tries to understand the culture and think of the next product that people will need or want. That's the way how I started to interpret the world. And it's such fun when you can take any conversation snippet and see if it fits into your system or doesn't, or if you could improve the system of interpretation.
And anyway, I thought, where can I do this? I thought, no way. Academia is too myopic. No, no, no, no. And then I thought,
Sam says fashion is an industry where you interpret trends and you can get concrete results relatively quickly. For example, back in the 90s, she noticed a trend in clothing and styles that weren't symmetrical.
She spotted this trend, reported it to her team and her client, and the result was an asymmetrical bag. It's tiny, petite bags.
It's of course like more a container for your keys, maybe your credit card, who knows, a lipstick. It does not offer much space. The design was not at all practical. It's shaped a little like a kidney, so no matter what you put in it, the weight just goes to one side. But it was a hit, became a classic for her client Christian Dior. They called it the saddlebag. It's been on Sex and the City. Beyonce had one a few years ago.
In recent years, Sam has become interested in the methods of trend forecasting. She wants to know how did the best forecasters get their incredible intuition? I would not say clairvoyance in that classical sense. It's not looking into the crystal glass, but have a real, very good understanding of where things are moving. She says there is a method. It's not magic.
She now teaches trend analysis and future forecasting at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She adds that not everyone uses her method, and also not everyone does it well. There's a lot of bulls**t as well. So how can you tell what is "that" and what is good trend forecasting? Leah Zaidi is a futurist at the Future Today Institute.
She says if forecasting is done well, you should come up with concrete advice for what's next. A good strategy is actionable. It's not something that is meant to be nebulous. It's not a very fluffy description of like, you should consider this. In other words, it should not be a horoscope, something that is so intentionally vague it could apply to almost anything.
Leia said an example of a good strategy is you should invest in renewable energy because the way the world is going, no matter what happens, that is going to be important. So futurism isn't predicting the future. It's a skill where you look for patterns, currents that drive culture. It's also the ability to see the world and imagine that it could be different. But
But who gets to shape what our future looks like may depend on how much power they have.
When Elon Musk used to talk about Hyperloop and the future of transportation as a network of underground tunnels, it got a lot of attention. What I think this really amounts to is an actual solution to the soul-crushing burden of traffic. This is something that I think will actually work. It's scalable. We have a demonstration tunnel here, and we expect to expand this over time to many cities all around the world. Elon Musk can say the future of transportation is Hyperloop,
But he's just saying that, right? And I could stand up and say like the future of transportation is like me on my bike. But like people aren't listening to me. People aren't throwing millions of dollars at me when I say ride in my bike.
That's Devon Powers again. She says we could all play a more active role in our own future. Businesses have figured this out and they figured it out in ways that have impacts on all of our lives. And so I think it's only fair to and it's only sort of just for everyday individuals to also recognize this.
that this is a practice that you can bring into your everyday life and that you can bring into your professional life so that you can kind of balance that control. And it's not just more powerful interests than you that are deciding what future you will live. Once she realized this, she says she saw the world a little bit differently. For example, she used to live in a quickly developing neighborhood in Philadelphia.
She was at a meeting where property developers were telling neighbors about their plans to build more high-rises and parking and businesses. They say things like, well, you know, this is the future, right? The future of Philadelphia is more, you know, tall buildings and more density on the streets and more people walking around and you just have to sort of go with it. And, yeah.
I started to intervene when I heard language like that. And I was like, the future is not predetermined, right? You don't get to tell me what my future is. And so that's just, you know, a very sort of small example. And it's not as though that way of thinking has stopped all of the development happening in my neighborhood. It for sure has not. But I think it's a very empowering way to think because I think a lot of people think, you know what, I have no, I have no control over this stuff. Right.
And you actually do. And I think one of the ways that you do is by countering this discourse that, you know, the future is set in stone and it's set in stone by people who are actually doing the work of shaping the future themselves. They just don't want to call it that. They call it progress or they call it technology or they call it some kind of inevitable force. And it's not. It's never inevitable. That story was reported by Alan Yu.
You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Also, subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch with us and to find out what's happening on the show. Each week, I'll send you a recap of favorite moments from the latest episode. There are exclusive previews of what's ahead and ways to participate in upcoming episodes. To sign up, go to whyy.org slash The Pulse Newsletter.
Coming up, an invitation to envision a different, greener future and how to make it happen. What are you good at? What are your skills, your resources, your networks, your areas of expertise? Like what can you specifically bring to the table? We need literally every skill possible in order to address the climate crisis. That's next on The Pulse.
This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the future. It's easy to picture a grim future when we think about the effects of climate change, whether it's warnings about increasing temperatures and sea level rise issued by scientists, or stuff you've seen in movies like catastrophic floods or people walking around in post-apocalyptic masks.
Marine biologist and conservation strategist Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson says that doom and gloom messaging can do more harm than good.
And I think that lack of realistic future visions, projections has actually been holding us back because we don't really know what we're running toward. We only know what we're trying to get away from. And I feel like for most of us, that's just not enough motivation. But there aren't very many depictions of, okay, so what if we just rolled up our sleeves and
and implemented all the solutions we already have that are at this intersection of science and policy and culture and justice, then what kind of world would we get?
Ayana says that we all have a role to play in building a different future. And that's the kind of world she wants to see depicted in movies and TV shows. The meet cute at the composting facility or you catch the eye of the beautiful woman in the bike lane or the hot solar panel installer is the new sort of like pool boy trope for this decade.
You know, there's family fights at the EV charging station because your husband forgot to plug in the car before the road trip.
Ayana envisions a greener future, one that will be familiar in some ways and reinvented in others. In many ways, it's the systems that undergird our lives that will change. Our energy and food and transit systems, our buildings and infrastructure that are just supporting and enabling us to live lighter on the planet and adapt and become more resilient.
as we sort of move away from the brink and toward the many answers to this question of what if we get it right? What if we get it right is the title of Ayana's new book. It reads like an inspirational how-to manual for everybody to get involved. You have a system for...
helping all of us find ways to be part of the solution. It's a Venn diagram. Describe that and how it could help us figure out how we fit into the climate puzzle.
So picture a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles. And the first one is, what are you good at? What are your skills, your resources, your networks, your areas of expertise? Like what can you specifically bring to the table? We need literally everything.
every skill possible in order to address the climate crisis from graphic design to event planning to project management. It's not just politics and engineering by a long shot.
The second circle is what is the work that needs doing? Are there particular climate and justice solutions you want to focus on? And thinking about systemic changes and efforts that can be replicated or scaled as opposed to really focusing on the individual and household changes, which of course are also very much needed. And then the third question circle is what brings you joy?
And I think maybe a better word is actually satisfaction because it's about what gets you out of bed in the morning, what's gratifying, what energizes and enlivens you because working on climate solutions is in fact the work of our lifetimes. This is not something where five years from now we're just going to be done. And so finding things that you can keep doing without burning out is of course critical. And for me, that...
Literally drawing this out with colored pencils helped me to think about founding a policy think tank for the future of coastal cities, which is Urban Ocean Lab, because I'm a marine biologist. That's what my PhD is in. I am a policy nerd. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I'm concerned about the future of coastal communities. I'm really interested in design. That brings me a lot of joy and the types of collaborations you can do, but also just changing the rules of the game is so gratifying.
And tell me a bit about the work that you do with your organizations. What are some goals? What are some of the things you really want to accomplish? So about one in five Americans live in a coastal city.
About 40% of Americans live in a coastal county. This is absolutely not a coastal elite issue, the ways in which climate change is going to impact people who live near the ocean. So we need to figure out how to deal with sea level rise. We also need to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the ocean from
renewable energy offshore, which is primarily wind power right now, thinking about how we can protect and restore coastal ecosystems, which can absorb tons, literally tons of carbon, but also help protect shorelines.
and help protect coastal communities and infrastructure from storms. We need to think about regenerative farming in the ocean of seaweeds and shellfish and just the types of transitions for our infrastructure and community resilience. We also need to think about
climate-driven relocation. It's estimated that around 13 million Americans are going to have to move because of sea level rise alone. And of course, if we don't have a plan for that relocation, it will be chaotic and the people with the fewest resources are going to have the hardest time with that transition. So these are some of the issues that Urban Ocean Lab is grappling with
in collaboration with other organizations at the community and national levels. We're trying to just figure out, like, what are the policy frameworks that need to be in place in order to meet the moment?
So what does that work look like? Is it compiling research, meeting with stakeholders, talking to scientists, talking to politicians, all of the above? All of the above. One of the things that we've released this year is a resource hub with now I think over 500 resources vetted by our team from data sets to policy memos to government and scientific reports to example legislation.
Just an open access place that people can go and find information on what's working, lessons learned, best practices, etc. So we're not reinventing the wheel, but really repeating each other's successes and avoiding each other's failures so that we can move much more quickly. And we created that as a tool for coastal city governments and community leaders to be able to have the information they need to make better decisions for them.
And we've also recently released a memo on climate-driven relocation to start to be more concrete about the steps that would need to be taken in order to properly be prepared for all the change that's going to have to happen.
For the book, Ayana interviewed farmers, architects, advocates, and people with interesting ideas, like environmental historian Brian Donoghue. He's advocating for young people especially to move to rural areas, to move to small towns that have been hollowed out by globalization and the shifts in industry, and to become farmers, to become good citizens in these small towns.
across the country that have become ghost towns and seeing that as a way to improve the sustainability of our lifestyles through supporting our food system with local agriculture and forestry and really help to rehabilitate and bolster the
some communities that are facing really tough times economically. Now, a lot of times when we talk about climate solutions, people will say, let's grow trees, let's grow trees. And that's certainly part of it. But what does sustainable forestry look like in more detail? It looks like very selective cutting down of trees so that you're not really...
Stripping the mountainside, leaving the soil prone to erosion, taking away the complexity of the habitat, but just choosing specific trees that you want to harvest.
and replanting as you go instead of clear-cutting. And how does agriculture have to change in this country to become more sustainable and to be part of the climate solution as opposed to being a part of the climate problem? One of the things that first comes to mind is that we don't only have a climate crisis. We also have, at the same time, a biodiversity crisis.
And so there are about a million species at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, exploitation, climate change, but also pesticides and pollution. So when I think about agriculture, I think about how we could
do it in a way that's less poisonous to the rest of life and to ourselves, how we could use the practices of regenerative agriculture from composting and mulching and low-till farming and integrating different species and using cover crops as ways to improve the quality of the soil, reduce the risks of pests, and, you know, have healthy food to feed each other.
in addition to potentially absorbing some amount of carbon back into the soil. I think agriculture right now, so much of it is industrialized monocultures, which are actually quite fragile to diseases and other things.
and using a lot of fossil fuel in just the farm equipment, actually. Not to mention that pesticides and fertilizers are often derived from fossil fuels as well. So I think that just points to this larger challenge of having an economy and society that's based on burning fossil fuels.
And the estimate is that the industrial food system is responsible for something like 30% of global greenhouse gas pollution. And about half of that is from meat and dairy, which are using more than a third of the habitable land globally. So that's certainly, to put it mildly, a lot of room for improvement.
Are there any small changes that you've made in your own life after all of these conversations you had, any inspiration you took away? I think I made a very big change in my own life right before starting these interviews for the book, which is that I moved to Maine.
And my mother moved in with me. We consolidated our households and I have put solar panels on our roof, installed heat pump, hot water heater. We have a backup battery system. The house, the heating and cooling is done by geothermal energy. You know, we compost our food scraps.
and have a few chickens that are now just babies, but they'll be providing the eggs that we eat. And we're helping to restore the soil so that we can have a vegetable garden around our home. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist and the author of What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures. Now, if we do get it right, what kind of future do you see?
It's safer. It's healthier. It's greener. It's more collective. If we get it right, the combustion phase of humanity is over.
We have relocalized. We eat well. Our homes are comfortable. Our energy bills are lower. It's not drafty. There's no traffic because there's so fewer cars in cities because we have better transit options. The climate-concerned majority rules. The majority of Americans, the vast majority, are concerned about climate and want our governments to do more and want to personally contribute more.
If we get it right, there's fewer desk jobs because people are out in the world remaking society. And the trades like carpentry and plumbing and electrical and welding will become more revered again because that is actually what we need in order to make this transformation happen.
That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Chris Barish contributed reporting to this week's episode.
Charlie Kyer is our engineer, and this week we had additional engineering from Adam Staniszewski. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening. ♪
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