This episode features Julian Cribb, author, science communicator, and Co-Founder of the Council for the Human Future. During our conversation, we discuss Julian's latest book, Earth Detox. We talk about the threat of global poisoning and how we can chart the path toward a safer, cleaner world.
On The Planetary Podcast, you will meet the global leaders and innovators making a positive change on our planet. Covering topics like sustainability, climate change, and circular economy, The Planetary Podcast highlights sustainable solutions around the globe that inspire others to make a measurable difference.
Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Otter AI
Narrator
You're tuned in to The Planetary Podcast, where you will meet the global leaders and innovators making a positive change on our planet. Covering topics like sustainability, climate change, and circular economy, The Planetary Podcast highlights sustainable solutions around the globe that inspire others to make a measurable difference.
Now here's your host- Founder and CEO of The Planetary Press, Kimberly White.
Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to The Planetary Podcast. Today we are joined by Julian Cribb, author, science communicator, and Co-Founder of the Council for the Human Future. Thank you so much for joining us today!
Julian Cribb
You're welcome.
Kimberly White
You are a prolific author, you've written thousands of articles, and you founded ScienceAlert, an online publication focused on scientific research and discoveries. Can you tell us more about these experiences and what led you to dedicate your life to raising awareness of humanity's environmental dangers?
Julian Cribb
Well, I'm a journalist and a newspaper editor. But I've been writing about science for most of my 50-year career, and science has become the big thing. About 25 years ago, I began meeting a lot of rather depressed scientists. They were depressed because they were going to work every day and studying data that told them that the planet was falling apart. So whether they were looking at the climate, the soils, the water, the state of wildlife and endangered species, it didn't matter. The data was all saying the same thing, that the planet was coming apart at the seams, and humans were responsible. So basically, I talked to those scientists, and then I noticed that more and more older people- grandparents, particularly- were waking up to this. Then I noticed that more and more millennials were waking up to this. And generally, there is now a large number of people around the world who think that, basically, we're in the end game of human history.
So I didn't know as a journalist whether this was right or wrong, but I decided I could investigate it. I could find out what the best science worldwide was saying about this topic. That produced a book called Surviving the 21st Century, in which I identified ten mega-risks that are all coming together at the same time to impact humanity and all life on earth. Now, these ten risks cannot be separated from one another. You cannot just fix climate and hope that everything is going to be okay. You've got to fix the other nine risks, too, because they all threaten our future. So that was the conclusion. But the conclusion also was there are things that we can do about all these risks. They are all fixable. But we do have to put our minds together to come up with the solutions.
Kimberly White
Speaking of megarisks, you are one of the Founders of the Council for the Human Future. In our recent interview with your Co-Founder, John Hewson, we discussed those ten megarisks facing humanity. One of the risks identified by the Council is global poisoning. Can you elaborate on this megarisk that we face?
Julian Cribb
Yes, the risk of global poisoning is six times larger in quantum than climate change. It's killing about ten million people every single year. So, it's having a much bigger impact on humanity at the moment than climate change. Climate change may be bigger in the future, but at the moment, global poisoning is far worse than climate change. But nobody notices it. We complain about too many chemicals in our food or too much plastic in the ocean. But we only see the pixels in that picture. We're only seeing tiny little samples of it. There is something like 220 billion tons of chemicals unleashed by human activity into the biosphere every single year. And those accumulate. These chemicals don't just go away. They may break down into other chemicals, or they may recombine with other chemicals, but they keep on cycling and circling throughout the global system. They're getting into every single human being every moment of their lives, from the moment that they are conceived to the moment they die. So this affects absolutely everybody right now.
Kimberly White
That is incredibly disturbing. One example that comes to mind is microplastics. There was a recent study, that was really quite shocking, where researchers estimated that the average infant consumes 1.6 million microplastic particles a day.
Julian Cribb
Yes, that would be about right. The infant is absolutely exposed to the petrochemical industry from the word go. And no wonder it gets sick. And, you know, the fact this is starting to damage human intelligence. Now, there are signs that the human IQ is decreasing by around seven percent per generation. That's not a good place to be because it means it's going to be harder for us.
Kimberly White
You've recently released a new book- Earth Detox. Can you tell us about this?
Julian Cribb
Absolutely. Earth detox is a book describing the human chemical avalanche. It's the outpouring of all the chemicals that come from every single human activity. So it describes what we're releasing into the world, and what effect it's having on us, how it's damaging our health, and so on. But it also looks at the solutions, what we are going to do about it; it provides a roadmap for how we're going to solve this colossal problem. So it's a positive book. It's looking forward, it's optimistic, but it affects every single person. So don't say, "This doesn't concern me." This concerns you because your next breath, you are going to inhale chemicals. It is a book written for everybody. This applies to everybody, no matter which country you dwell in.
Kimberly White
In your new book, you relate that all of us are impacted by a global deluge of human-made chemicals and pollutants. Can you tell us what some of the top global offenders are and what risks they pose to human health?
Julian Cribb
We all know about heavy metals- mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium, and so forth. Those things are in our drinking water, in our food supply. A lot of them are in our household goods, people are exposed to them in industry, or they breathed them in from their city air. For example, the mercury comes out of coal-burning for it to produce electricity. So, these things are all around us. There are the endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are playing havoc with our bodies' metabolism, gender regulation, sexual development, growth- all of the various aspects that hormones regulate are being monkeyed around with now by chemicals that imitate the natural hormones in the body. And there are thousands of these chemicals. We don't even know the full tale of them. There are about 350,000 manmade chemicals. But, on top of that, there are millions of chemicals that are unleashed by activities like mining, agriculture, development, construction, travel, transport, all of those things. They're putting chemicals, unintentionally, into the environment around us. And we, of course, absorb them with almost every breath, with every drink, with every meal.
Kimberly White
That is unnerving. Now, you've written quite extensively about food security. What threats do chemical pollution pose to food security?
Julian Cribb
Five million tonnes of pesticides are used to grow the world's food at the moment. This is ten times more than when Rachel Carson warned us about them back in the 1960s. Those pesticides don't just disappear. They go into the soil. They go into the ecology around us. They are wiping out bees, birds, and others that pollinate crops. About a third of the human food supply here requires pollination. So if we kill off all the pollinators, then we're going to be down about a third of our food if we're not careful. Basically, 98 percent of agricultural chemicals hit a non-target organism; that is, a bumblebee, a farmworker, a consumer, something like that, something that wasn't intended. Now, levels are not high in the food that you buy in the supermarket, but they are there. And a lot of these chemicals, because they're not water-soluble, they're very hard to get rid of. So when you buy your fresh vegetables, no matter how hard you wash them, you cannot get rid of the chemicals. Basically, washing doesn't work very well. So, this is a real dilemma. You can't avoid these things. They're coming at you. Even if you shop for organic food, to some degree, it's getting contaminated by farmers on the farm next door and things like that. So we have to get off this growing food with poisons kick; it's just not a future. There are a lot of farmers who are becoming organic farmers or regenerative farmers who are trying to minimize or eliminate their use of poisons, and that is a very important development.
Kimberly White
Absolutely. There's often talk about avoiding specific produce like strawberries or apples- produce listed as the "dirty dozen"- because of the amount of pesticide residue. For farmers producing organic crops, it is becoming increasingly difficult due to pesticide drift from neighboring conventional farms.
Julian Cribb
Yes, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization produced a report which basically said that most of the world's arable farmland is now contaminated. Most of it. So even if you're an organic farmer, if you want to set up a farm on a place that's been farmed by conventional methods before, you're gonna find your soil is almost permanently polluted. It's very hard to clean soil once it's been poisoned. So, these things are everywhere; they're out of control. It's basically death by a thousand cuts because we're talking about thousands of different chemical companies producing thousands of different chemicals. Very, very hard to regulate. A lot of these chemicals now come from developing countries where there is no regulation or control over their manufacture, distribution, or use. They're coming into foodstuffs that are in circulation worldwide. So this is a very disturbing dimension of it. Another one that many farmers point to is that, of course, these things are killing the biosphere in which agriculture exists. They're poisoning the water supply. They're affecting, as I say, the ecology in which agriculture survives. So we're actually taking down our future ability to grow food by doing these things. Now, we have to move away from this highly toxic mode of food production to a far less toxic mode. I'm not saying do away with all farm chemicals, but I'm saying we have to use softer, safer chemicals if we're going to use them at all.
But as I've warned in my earlier books, agriculture itself is under tremendous threat. Its soils are running out, its water is running out, and the stable climate that it once enjoyed is gone. So we may not be doing agriculture very much longer; it's going to start to break down in the mid-century. We need to find other ways to produce food that are low in toxins, which uses very little water and land but which produce highly nutritious, clean, safe healthy food. Such systems do exist. Urban food production systems can be made to do this, for example. Deep ocean aquaculture can also be made to do this. So there are alternatives to the traditional 10,000-year-old technique of putting plants in soil and growing them outdoors.
Kimberly White
You're right. There are so many different options. Things are changing every single day due to new innovations. Meat production, for example. We see a lot of new research and development go towards lab-grown meat—the same with plant-based alternatives. There are so many options. There's not going to be one silver bullet solution; it is going to be many different solutions. Different ideas from people coming together from around the world.
Julian Cribb
That's correct. I mean, farmers are very inventive people. They have to be to stay afloat. Basically, they're coming up with all these new ideas for ways of producing food, both agriculturally and non-agriculturally. There's a huge opportunity. Probably the biggest global opportunity that exists today is not renewable energy. It's renewable food. Why? Because every single person on the earth needs food, two or three times a day. We are going to consume something like 11 trillion meals a day by the middle part of the century. They've got to come from somewhere. Now, growing them in cities by recycling water and recycling nutrients is one very sensible pathway for this to take. And it's already starting to happen. Bio cultures, hydroponics, aquaponics, all of these intensive techniques, which often involve very little or no chemical use, are all coming down the line at the moment. It's early days, a lot of those companies are going to go broke, but some of them aren't, and they're going to make a huge success. And we can feed everybody on earth well if we go to this new system of food production. That's the point. We don't need to have starvation. And indeed, if you do that, you're actually going to get rid of two-thirds of the world's wars. Why? Because two-thirds of wars are generated by disputes over food, land, and water. So if we feed everybody adequately, we've got rid of a lot of the reasons for conflict that exists in our world. We will have a much more peaceful world. So food really holds the key to solving a lot of problems that humans now face.
Kimberly White
That's a great point. We're also really seeing the level of awareness increase when it comes to climate change. So, it is an exciting time right now because more people are focused on solving this huge challenge. It is bringing forth a lot of innovative solutions that are not just beneficial for climate but are more sustainable, use fewer chemicals, and are less water-intensive. We're seeing people discuss regenerative agriculture a lot more fervently- which is fantastic.
Julian Cribb
If we put the same amount of intellectual effort and the same amount of financial investment into regenerative farming and urban food production that we have put into chemical farming, for example, then we've got this problem licked. We will solve this problem in no time at all. We just need to get the scientists into this. The scientists are still working for the chemical companies at the moment, for the most part. And that's a disgrace, really. We need to get them focused on how you do regenerative agriculture safely, cleanly, healthily and how you repair the landscape. If we go to this new system of food production, regenerative farming, plus urban food production, and deep-sea aquaculture, that will feed the world quite adequately, and it will end the sixth extinction, as well as stopping about two-thirds of wars.
Kimberly White
I am glad you mentioned that because one of the leading causes of deforestation is our consumption of agricultural commodities. Palm oil is a great example because it is in about half of everything on our grocery store shelves here in the U.S. We're having this huge impact on countries like Indonesia, and specifically in the area of Borneo. But because it is imported from a faraway place and does not impact our local environment, it's out of sight and mind.
Julian Cribb
It is having an impact on all countries and all human beings. Because if you clear the Amazon or you clear-fell Borneo, you're increasing the rate of carbon emissions into the atmosphere; you're accelerating climate change. Land clearing, after coal burning, is the next most dangerous thing that humans can do if they want to destroy a habitable earth. So we're destroying a habitable earth for Americans, Australians, as well as people living in Indonesia or Borneo or the Amazon basin. So, these things now are on such a large scale that they affect every single one of us. This is why I'm drawing attention to the chemical issue because humans have just unleashed this torrent of chemicals worldwide. You can find them everywhere you look. You can find them on the peak of Mount Everest, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, in squid three kilometers down in the North Atlantic, in polar bears in the Arctic. These are human industrial chemicals. You can find them in the blood of every single American, European, Chinese. We are all absolutely glutted with these things at the moment. And we don't even know the problems that are coming down at us. The medical literature contains quite a lot of warning signs, but this is really bigger and much worse for us, even than climate change. I mean, climate change is bad enough, heaven knows, but this one is just slipping under the radar. We are ignoring it. Governments worldwide are ignoring it. It's got to be fixed, and it can be fixed.
Kimberly White
I agree. And I think an important part of the conversation is that we can't just get so focused, and I think that's happened a lot of times. We start to work in a silo; we get focused on one issue and one issue only, and that does happen with climate and the biodiversity space. But, as you have said, we can't solve one without solving the other. And we have to make sure that the solutions to one don't exacerbate the problem of the other, especially as we're trying to come up with all of these solutions to these converging crises we have. We have to take those blinders off and look at all of the issues we're facing, not just a singular view.
Julian Cribb
Absolutely. And at the moment, there is no government on the planet, except possibly Bhutan, that has a policy for human survival. Right? There is no government in the world that is committed to human survival. No government has a policy for dealing with all ten of the threats. Now, some of them have sort of a half policy for dealing with climate change. And a couple of them have policies for dealing with nuclear weapons and things like that. But they've not got an answer to this complex of ten huge threats that are bearing down on us that constitute the human existential emergency, the biggest threat that humans have ever faced. So it's time we got real about these things, and we start to think about the solutions, and as you say, make sure those solutions do no harm. We have to make sure that however good the solution is, we don’t just replace one dirty chemical with another dirty chemical. We have to think ahead and analyze the consequences of our actions and come up with much safer solutions.
Kimberly White
Absolutely, and that we do so not just in an environmentally sustainable way, but a socially sustainable way.
Julian Cribb
Yeah, well, a few years ago, I was visiting the Atacama Desert in Chile. And there are these wonderful salt lagoons there, which used to have thousands and thousands of flamingos in them. Now, my guide, who was taking me around said, there were only three flamingos for me to photograph, right? He said, "Look, if you'd come here five years ago, that would have been 3000." I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Basically, it's lithium." The lithium mines- and this is the center of the world's lithium mining up in the Andes there- are extracting all the water. By taking away the water, they're making these brine lagoons too saline. That's killing the things that feed the flamingos. So this is an example we've transferred our efforts from coal-burning and petroleum burning to solar and lithium batteries. This is for everybody's mobile phone, everybody's laptop, everybody's soon to be motorcar, you know, but we're ruining the world by lithium mining. So we really need to look ahead and say, "What on earth are we doing here? Do we need that much water? Is there a more water-efficient system that we can use for extracting lithium that doesn't destroy the whole ecosystem that surrounds it?" So these are examples of things that we've just got to start looking ahead and behaving more like Homosapiens than Homostupidous.
Kimberly White
I like that. Now, in recent years, we have seen several prominent cases of chemical contamination here in the United States with the Flint water crisis, health issues associated with Superfund sites, and the area dubbed as cancer alley in Louisiana. How extensive is this problem, and globally, how many contaminated sites are there?
Julian Cribb
This is only an estimate. But it comes from the world's top scientists in this area, about ten million, it's probably a large underestimate. Because you know, every farm has a dump for chemical drums and things, old chemical drums and what have you. There are probably ten million industrial sites, and most of them are located in our big cities. So the poisons are concentrated beneath the very feet of those citizens. And for that reason, the groundwater in those cities cannot be drunk. In some cases, that is a crisis because the big cities of Asia, for example, rely on groundwater completely to supply drinking water to their populations. And that water is horribly polluted by all the old oils, service stations, chemical leaks, and things from industrial sites, car servicing plants, dry cleaners, you name it, it's all trickled down into the groundwater. And it's active down there. If we bring it up and consume it, we get cancer. So this is a threat to practically everybody in the world at the moment, and it has to be dealt with. Seriously, it has to be dealt with. There are solutions that are technical solutions, I don't want to go into the details because they're long and boring. But you know, basically, we can solve that problem. The first thing to do is to stop polluting, to stop ditching all of our filth and sticking it underground into the groundwater where it comes up again in our food supply or our drinking water.
Kimberly White
Now, in your book, you propose a new human right- the right not to be poisoned. Can you share why the addition of this right is so critical? What are the challenges of getting such a right established?
Julian Cribb
Well, certainly, if we think about the environment in which our great great grandparents grew up, they were not exposed to any of these chemicals. All of these chemicals mostly have come into use since World War II, and predominantly in the last 25 or 30 years. So this chemical avalanche has come on humanity quite suddenly. If you go back to the 19th century, early 19th century, nobody was exposed to these things, absolutely nobody. So, that was a right for every single human being throughout the whole of history, to live a chemical-free life, a life free from these manmade cancers, and so forth. That was a right that they all had. Now I'm suggesting we simply reclaim that right. In human rights, there is a right not to be tortured. Okay, now, presumably, that's a right that only applies to a small amount of people at any one time. But we all enjoy that right—the right not to be tortured by our governments.
Now, why do we not have a right not to be poisoned? I mean, poisoning is a form of torture. The diseases and the illnesses and the disability that these poisons cause to 80 to 90 million people every single year are a form of torture, and they should be excluded on exactly the same basis. We have a right to a clean earth, air we can breathe, water we can drink, food we can eat, homes we can live in safely and healthily. We all should enjoy such a right. Now, the reason that I advocate is I don't say having such a right is going to change things overnight. It's not, but it will make everybody aware of the need for a clean earth. It will mean that companies that are continuing to poison and pollute will start to feel the heat. People will stop buying their products, they will be shunned by society, they will be regulated, they will be controlled, they'll be fined much more frequently if there is a right not to be poisoned. So they will be shunted, willingly or unwillingly, towards a clean earth policy, towards clean, green chemistry, and other forms of manufacturing that are safe for humans to use. So the right is there as a great symbol of the world we want to create—a clean, healthy world in which children are not poisoned from the moment of conception.
Kimberly White
I think we can all agree that's an important right to have. Now, your book also outlines a ten-point plan to address the toxic burden. Can you elaborate on this?
Julian Cribb
Basically, everybody who's concerned about this, and it's interesting to me that on the whole, men are not concerned about it, but women are very concerned about it. So most of the groups that are concerned about chemical poisoning, such as the Breast Cancer Association, for example, are led by women. So women have a much stronger awareness of the scale of the chemical problem and a much stronger determination to do something about it than men. Men tend to say, "Oh, we want to fix the problem. There's an insect over there. Let's spray it, and who cares what the damage the spray does after we've killed the insect." Now, men don't think much beyond the immediate gratification or the immediate need. So we do need to put women in charge of cleaning up society. If you look at the chemical industry, it's run by men. Chemistry is a male-dominated profession, chemicals are male concepts, and it has been since the word go. Something like nine or ten percent of the CEOs in the chemical industry are women. So, 90 percent male, we need to get female thinking about the safety of the species, the safety of the children, into the chemical industry badly. So we really need to change the balance of the debate, and we need to be a lot more open to female thinking on this issue than we are at the moment.
Kimberly White
Absolutely. I think we see something similar when we're talking about climate, for example, or even the COVID response. We've seen that the countries that are led by women have had stronger climate plans and stronger responses to the vaccine as well. I mean, look at New Zealand, for example.
Julian Cribb
Yeah, well, guess what? Countries that are led by women don't start wars. Women have led their countries in war when war was declared on them, but they've never started a war. It's men who start wars. It's men who clear-fell the forests in the Amazon, not women. It's men who empty the oceans of fish, not women. These are all blind male activities. And if we are to survive on this planet, we need female thinking, not male thinking about how you do so. Now, there's a lot of good men around there, don't get me wrong, a lot of men who think like women and who do think about the future, but not nearly enough. All of these big industries, the financial industry, the chemical industry, the food industry, if you looked at the boards of those industries, you would find that they are predominantly male, they're dominated by male groupthink. They are not thinking about the future. They're only thinking about the dollars today. And so we need to change that way of thinking. By putting more women, a majority of women on these boards, and in our governments and our parliaments, and so on, that is how we're going to do that. So putting women in charge is a terribly important part of human survival. We will not survive if we leave males in charge. Because when the crunch comes, we will have war, and that will be unsurvivable. So we need female thought, and we need female leadership, as we have never needed them before.
Kimberly White
Thank you for joining us, Julian! Alright, that's it for today. Global poisoning is a threat that spans the entire world, affecting us all. With roughly 220 billion tons of chemicals unleashed by human activity each year, it is essential that governments take notice and action. In his new book, Julian Cribb provides a look into the chemical catastrophe facing humanity and describes how we can chart the path toward a safer, cleaner world. Earth Detox is available now wherever books are sold. Please join us next time for another episode of The Planetary Podcast.