The Planetary Podcast

For this episode's show notes, please visit The Planetary Press: 
http://www.theplanetarypress.com/2021/08/Ingmar-Rentzhog-The-Planetary-Podcast

Interview Transcript

Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to The Planetary Podcast. Today we are joined by Dr. John Hewson, former leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, Professor at the Australian National University, and Chair of the Council for the Human Future. Thank you for joining us today!

John Hewson

It's an absolute pleasure, Kimberly.

Kimberly White

Now, the council has identified ten megarisks to civilization. Can you please tell us what these risks are?

John Hewson

Yes, well, we've recently established the council, and we declared our mission really is to alert the global society to the significance and urgency of a series of what we've identified as catastrophic human-made risks, sort of been a victim of our own success in many ways from about the middle of the last century. And these risks together comprise an existential emergency facing all humanity. So our aim is to promote a coherent strategy that will set human civilization on a path to surviving and thriving these risks.

Kimberly White

Now, the council has identified ten “megarisks” to civilization. Can you please tell us what these risks are?

John Hewson

So the ones we've focused on are: the decline of key natural resources, the collapse of ecosystems that support life and the mass extinction of species; human population growth and demand beyond the earth's carrying capacity; global warming, sea-level rise, and change in the climate that's affecting all human activity; widespread pollution of the earth systems by chemicals; rising food insecurity and failing nutritional quality; nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction; pandemics of new and untreatable diseases; the advent of powerful and uncontrolled new technologies; and finally, what we've described as really as a universal human failure to understand and act preventively on these risks. 

One of my personal frustrations is the way governments, we would say loosely, ignore the science. They ignore warnings, even specific warnings, as we saw in terms of COVID, pushing these issues down the road as if they're not going to happen. And then, you know, getting caught by surprise or getting caught short. And if you anticipate the risks, and you properly assess the significance of the risks, and you look at the alternative ways in which they can be dealt with effectively, then you can have a very bright future. I mean, most governments got caught short. Their responses have been variable, but within a global collaborative framework that we had to deal with this and as a matter of urgency. And I've been impressed about how quickly people in our country, for example, have responded. Changing the way they live, the way they work, the way they travel, what they say, how they spend, accepting completely different roles, expanded roles for government, and so on, which is sort of been to me a bit of a dress rehearsal for what's possible if we all sign off on the significance of the challenge, and we all pitch in to do our bit at whatever level of society around the globe actually to deal with these serious, very serious risks and threats to our future.

Kimberly White

Now, which of these risks do you find the most pressing at this time?

John Hewson

Well, we don't prioritize. In fact, we argue that it's important to consider them collectively. You don't want to pursue one risk to the detriment of others. You might be able to stimulate more economic activity in a recovery phase by doing more with fossil fuels, but you do a lot of additional damage to the objective in relation to climate. So our focus is really not to prioritize, although, the public debate clearly does focus on some more than others. And then, of course, the intensity of concern varies a lot with the way that some of these issues unfold.

Kimberly White

Absolutely, and, you know, one of the main criticisms when it comes to sustainable development is that a lot of times when we're dealing with some of these issues, we work on them in silo, and we come up with these solutions, they might be solutions to the one issue we're facing, but can exacerbate the others. 

John Hewson

That's right, and we've got to be very careful not to do that. And that's been our principal motivating focus, really, and getting people to understand that and accept that. I mean, I recognize the magnitude of that challenge, but you've got to start somewhere, and you've got to push hard, and that's really what we see our role is in this council.

Kimberly White

That's great. And, you know, again, with the governments' responses and COVID. In recent years, we've seen a growing call for governments to step up and take concrete action on the climate emergency. And I think especially so, recently, with the pandemic, we've seen an increase in calls for green recovery. However, there have been few countries that have actually raised their level of ambition enough to meet our climate goals, as seen in the recent NDC synthesis report. How can we increase political will to the levels necessary to tackle these existential threats facing our global community?

John Hewson

Well, it is a frustration. You know that there is no question that these threats are real. There's no question that they are happening now. There's no question that they're extremely grave, yet governments don't seem to want to listen. And I agree with you. I mean, I thought that, you know, everyone's talking about how we recover from the worst or most disruptive economic and social circumstances since the Great Depression. And you look at the pathways to the transition that you need to make, say to a low carbon world by the middle part of this century. And all of those transition pathways, sector by sector, offer very realistic growth potential in terms of investment, in terms of measured growth, in terms of jobs. 

So politically, you would think our governments will embrace it. Yet, as you say, they've been very hesitant to actually do that. I think it's a terrible lost opportunity. One of the problems we have had in Australia is going back over the last couple of decades, we have had a very, sort of surreal political debate. Two major parties scoring points on each other and trying to shift blame rather than solving problems, and they just kick this task down the road. And the difficulty is that it's all been done in the context of them asserting, then government, for example, asserting that any response to climate, for example, must be not just disruptive, it must be negative in terms of its impact on growth and jobs, which is completely wrong. 

You know, an effective response to climate would give you new industries, new businesses, new jobs, new directions, great potential for accelerating momentum, and so on. Yet, the debate has been really distorted by this simplistic notion that we shouldn't have more disruption, or we should risk losing things in the context of recovering from this pandemic, yet, ironically, it is one of the most effective ways out. And as you say, we haven't seen too many genuine green deals from one government to the next. And, you know, you are seeing Biden push this now in the United States; it's going to put a lot of pressure on Australia, where we are a designated laggard in terms of our recognition of the seriousness of the climate challenge and the magnitude of our response. And I do think there'll be a global competition this year led b...

Kimberly White

Hello and welcome to The Planetary Podcast. Today we are joined by Angela Pozzi, Founder and Artistic Director of the Washed Ashore Project. Thank you so much for joining us today, Angela.

Angela Pozzi

Thank you. It’s exciting to be here.

Kimberly White

So Angela, can you tell us more about your work with Washed Ashore?

Angela Pozzi

Well, I’m the founder of Washed Ashore, art to save the sea, which is actually a nonprofit organization based in a little tiny town on the southern Oregon coast called Bandon, Oregon. It is an educational nonprofit where we work with volunteers to clean up beaches of plastic pollution, and then people bring all that stuff into us. We process it, turn all that stuff into educational art supplies, and we create gigantic sculptures in the forms of marine animals that are threatened by plastic pollution. Then, in order to do the work that we really want to, we exhibit our work around the country in four different traveling exhibits and try to reach as many people as we possibly can with the idea that if people see the junk that is washing up on our beaches and recognize it as things that they use every day, we will start changing people’s consumer habits. So, that’s really what we do, and we have signage to go with it. But our work is meant to be powerful and huge, and you can’t ignore it so that we can get more solutions happening to tackle the plastic pollution problem.

Kimberly White

That’s amazing. The artwork that you created is just larger than life and so beautiful to look at. It’s hard to believe that it’s made out of something like plastic pollution. So have you always been an artist? And can you share more about your background?

Angela Pozzi

Yes, I do want to tag on to what you just said because our work is often considered and what we try for is beautiful but horrifying. Go with beautiful and horrifying, just kind of an interesting combination. So me as an artist, I was one of those few fortunate people who grew up with art surrounding me. My mom was a professional artist, and she made sure that we knew what that meant to be a professional artist. That meant she had a studio full time, and that was her job. She went to work every morning making art, and just as a painter and an exhibitor, worked in museums and galleries and sold it.

My father was an arts administrator, which means he was a museum director when I was a kid, and so I got to just go into museums and galleries all the time. So I was very, very blessed with always having a place in my mother’s studio, and my parents nurtured my creativity ever since I was a baby. So I was really, really lucky, and it’s really funny. I’ve taken art lessons along the way. But really, my parents growing up at my mom’s studio and having art critiques and going to museums is really my best arts education. Although I did study it, what I realized was that I was so lucky that a lot of my friends and everybody in my public schools didn’t get it, didn’t understand how important art was as a language and how great it was. And so, I was determined to become an art teacher.

So I went off to college, I got my education degree and got certified as an early childhood elementary teacher, and specialized in art. Then I ended up teaching, actually certified with art all the way through high school. So I was actually a dedicated art teacher to bring the kind of love for the arts and the importance of it to the rest of the public. For 30 years, I was an art teacher. And my mother always said, “You know, Angela, you should really be an artist,” and I’m like, “no, no, no; you guys do that, I don’t. I’m an art teacher,” When she passed away when I was age 40, I finally looked at myself and went, you know, maybe I should give it a shot. Maybe my mom had something; maybe I should give it, see what I’ve got in me. So I went to part-time teaching and started making art out of repurposed materials. I actually still have a website up called sea things art.com, and that is my earlier work, and I would go to thrift stores, and I would get stuff that, you know, were interesting looking and put them together, but I was always intrigued with the ocean. So my work always reflected coral reefs and sea creatures and made-up things, and so that really kind of led me into Washed Ashore. I started really becoming an artist in, you know, in the last 20 years, really, because I’m now 63. So yeah.

Kimberly White

I just love your story. I think it’s so cool how you went from, you know, that background of having your parents as the art teachers for that enrichment and then being an art teacher, and then you’re obviously a very talented artist. So your mother was right.

Angela Pozzi

Still learning!

Kimberly White

What inspired you to use plastics as your medium? Can you tell me a little bit more about how Washed Ashore came about?

Angela Pozzi

That was also a very personal story. I had always come to the southern Oregon coast as a child, even though we never lived here. My parents lived in Utah and then in Washington State. We would always come to Bandon, Oregon, every summer where my grandparents lived, but also where our family had a family cabin on a little lake. So I spent all my summers here. I mean, I loved it here so much that I would when I was older, I had the key to the cabin on my keychain, and I would just hold it and stare at it, going, I can get to the ocean anytime I want. Because I never lived at the ocean and so it always had a special place in my heart. I always walked to beaches when I was a kid and really felt like it was, you know, just a sacred place. I’ve known the beaches in this area for a very long time. When I was a little kid, we would find something from Japan and get really excited. I was like, oh, wow, look at this, you know, we’d run home and just like, wow, we put it up on our mantel because it was so special to find usually something plastic and you’re like ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ Now, it’s a whole different world. So what happened was, as I was teaching, I was up in Vancouver, Washington as a full-time teacher.

The other part of my life is I was married to a wonderful artist and also art teacher, Craig Pozzi. We got married in 1980. We have a beautiful daughter, Nicola Pozzi. We were married for 25 years when he suddenly became very ill with seizures, and a whole series of events happened, where he ended up dying in 2004, and I was a mess. We were living in Vancouver. My daughter was a mess. I was a mess. It was just really traumatic. He was paralyzed the last year of his life, and I couldn’t teach. I was just disabled by the whole thing, really. So I really had to figure out how to get my life back and what my life would look like and what would be my purpose in life because I just was destroyed. So I thought I have to move to the ocean and let’s move to Bandon, Oregon, because that way I can go to the place that’s always been there for me, I can heal there. So I did, I moved to Bandon, and I walked the beaches every day, and I noticed there was like junk on the beach, but I really didn’t want to see it. I kind of walked over it. I just wanted to see beauty and heal. Until one day, it was so in my face. It had been a couple of years actually being down in Bandon making my artwork; when there we go, that’ll keep you busy, and let’s just make that happen.

My mom was also a great woman that...