Julian Cribb – Surviving the 21st Century Introduction

Well, we’re living in some very interesting times, moments of great reflection. We’ve covered some of those issues. We’re going to cover many more in the weeks and months ahead, but today was such a great opportunity to speak to what I believe is one of the world’s top science writers. His name is Julian Cribb.

And Julian has written many books and inspired many people, and we’re going to be talking about many of those issues today. I’m not going to spoil it for you, other than to say, I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Julian Cribb. Welcome to the show, Julian.

Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to Unstress. I’m Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, we’re living in some very interesting times, moments of great reflection. We’ve covered some of those issues. We’re going to cover many more in the weeks and months ahead, but today was such a great opportunity to speak to what I believe is one of the world’s top science writers. His name is Julian Cribb.

And Julian has written many books and inspired many people, and we’re going to be talking about many of those issues today. I’m not going to spoil it for you, other than to say, I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Julian Cribb. Welcome to the show, Julian.

Julian Cribb: Thank you, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Julian, you are a prolific writer and I’ve read so many of your books and I wanted to discuss those with you today, but I wondered if you might just share with our listeners little bit about your story and what got you to this point?

Julian Cribb: Yeah, well, as you say, I’ve been a journalist and a newspaper editor for 50 years now. I’ve been writing about science for nearly all of that time. But I’ve been a specialist science writer really since the mid 1990s. And I wrote about science because it was journalistic freedom to me. You can write about anything you like. And as I progressed in my science writing, I began bumping into more and more scientists and grandparents such as myself and young millennials who were all rather despairing and saying, “Is this the end of history as we know it?”And that concerned me deeply.

What I knew was that we were in some considerable trouble, but I didn’t know how bad that trouble was. But I thought as a science writer, it’s possible for me to delve into the best science in the world and find out exactly what is going on, what does the best science say about the many and various risks that humanity is manufacturing for itself? And that’s basically where it went. I started off looking at the food risks because that’s the area that I knew best. But I pretty soon branched out into all the other risks as well. I’ve written four books and many thousands of articles since that time.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Yeah. Well, I became very aware of your work with the Poisoned Planet, which was published in2014 and I know you’re going through a revision of it as only one can, given the scale of the problem. Can you tell us a bit about that book and some of the learnings that you shared with your reader there?

Julian Cribb: Yeah, that grew out of work that I did for a cooperative research centre called the Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment, CRC CARE. And with Professor Ravi Naidu, in particular, who headed that up. And they were looking at the issue of contaminated sites and how do you clean them up. But they started broadening that out into more and more different aspects of contamination. And I found this absolutely fascinating and the more I delved into it.

They used to hold these big conferences where scientists from all over the world would attend with their own stories of local pollution. And I began to see this big jigsaw puzzle assembling before my very eyes. Every single one of these stories was a story of local pollution. So it might be air pollution in Beijing or water pollution in Shanghai or water pollution in the United States.

But it started to add up to me to a very big picture. And that’s the advantage of being a science writer. Unlike a scientist, you’re not confined by a single area of discipline. You can look at the big picture, you can assemble all of the pieces and see what sort of a picture you get. And I started to get very, very concerned at the enormous scale of the pollution of the planet that was taking place.

I started to rough out some numbers on the back of an envelope and it quickly struck me that the pollution of the planet that we’re doing by all the various means that we have, actual production of toxic chemicals, but also the unintentional release of soil and polluted water and things like that. Our impact on the planet is many times larger than the impact of climate change in fact. Sorry, I’ve got to pause there, my telephones ringing.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: That’s all right. The interesting thing about the chemicals side of things is that it’s not only the chemicals that are produced as an end product but there’s so many other that are given off as waste along the way as well. So many more chemicals than we even imagine we’re being exposed to, we’re exposed to.

Julian Cribb: Yes. And I have to say that the chemical industry has been very disingenuous about this. And they’ve relied, I find this extraordinary, they’ve relied on this old chap called Paracelsus. So it was around 500 years ago, a Swiss alchemist of all people, who said the dose is the poison. So whenever you ask a chemical company is their product poisonous, they say, “Oh, no, as long as is less than so many parts per billion in your glass of water or your pizza or whatever it is, it’s harmless.”

And that of course is complete and utter bullshit. That chemical can combine, it can mount up in your system, it can bioaccumulate, it can produce new chemicals, it can produce daughter products. There’s all sorts of things that can happen there.

So by saying to society, “Don’t worry about it, chemicals are safe. We’ve been using them for years.” These guys are just fudging it, to put it politely and they’re lying flat out, to put it more directly. And the medical science, which is really piling up now, and there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of medical papers now that are making the connection between various chemicals or mixtures of chemicals and various human diseases. And we have the Lancet Commission come out two years ago and estimate that 9 million people were dying of chemical poisoning of one sort or another or diseases started by it, every single year. So that’s 50% higher than the death toll in World War II.

Julian Cribb: So this is a really serious issue. And even that is a very large underestimate because, for example, it doesn’t include cancers. And we know that anywhere from 30 to 50% of all cancers are triggered by some kind of chemical in your environment acting on your genes, scrambling your immune system in some way. So, the picture is probably much, much worse than 9 million. It’s probably of the order of 14, 15million. And we don’t know.

The answer is, most of the chemicals that we produce, and there are 140,000 of them, have never been tested for human safety. Or they’ve only been tested in a very vestigial manner. For example, the maximum residue limits are set on the basis of an adult male. That doesn’t tell you where the children are getting poisoned by the same chemical at those supposedly safe rates or whether women or people of lower body mass are getting poisoned.

So there’s a lot of misleading information going on about this. And I felt that it was my job to try to bring together all the science I could find on this topic, but put it in a way that ordinary consumers can understand and use in their daily lives as they try to avoid these things.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, it is ultimately we as consumers, that drive the market for those chemicals and by making informed choices, and this is a story that’s very easy to miss, but once you hear it, very difficult to ignore. You came out of that book, I know that at the end of that book there were principles that we should adopt. Could you just share a couple of those with us?

Julian Cribb: Yeah. Well, I feel that it ought to be a human right not to be poisoned. And we’ve got a human right not to be tortured and we’ve got a human right to a healthy life. We’ve got a human right to democratic expression of our views. There’s all kinds of human rights. But this poisoning has really only been going in the last 50 to70 years. It really got a go on with World War II and the rise of the biochemical industries which were making munitions. They made the poison gasses and the shells and God knows what in World War II. So really, that chemistry industry is what’s doing the, and of course, the massive outgrowth in the petroleum industry, because a lot of these things are made from petroleum.

So it’s a very recent phenomenon. The point is that every single human being, prior to the industrial revolution, did not get poisoned by manmade chemicals. For the exception of the ones that Lucrezia Borgia took out, or one or two of those. But seriously, our entire ancestry lived a life free of these toxins. Now we’ve got something like 200 billion tonnes of them being emitted every single year in our air, in our food, in our water, in our clothing, in our houses, in our cars. We’ve got absolutely no handle, scientifically speaking, on the quantum of this problem.

So I thought a good place to start was to establish a human right not to be poisoned. And that’s just a way of conditioning the debate around this issue, it’s drawing a line in the sand saying everyone has a right to a reasonably healthy life. That a big chemical company or a careless mining company cannot just come along and poison you.

Julian Cribb: And the problem that we’ve seen so far, if you look at all of the big chemical scandals, Minamata and Bhopal and Seveso and all of those, Tianjin and things like that. The onus of proof has always been on the victims to prove that they got poisoned, not on the government or the chemical company to prove that its processes were safe. And that’s an outrage basically. People are being killed, the chemical companies know they’re killing people, but they hide behind lawyers. They hide behind sham claims and 15th century alchemists and whatever.

So this has got to change. And I think the push has got to come from the medical profession. The medical profession has got to front up and say, “Enough of these things.” And they’re starting to say that. Get them out of our food, get them out of our air, get them out of our water. And consumers have to be given the right information so that they know what they’re buying.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, its interesting, I mean the regulatory bodies that have largely been dismantled and in the last 40 or 50 years is not a small part of the problem, but it’s interesting to consider, I think there was President Eisenhower when he left in 1961, said, “The thing we have to fear most is the unsolicited influence of the industrial and military complex.” And this is translated into this very issue that you raised in your book, isn’t it?

Julian Cribb: Yes, it has. The chemical industry is not as powerful as the coal and oil industries, although they’re so closely related to one another, there’s hardly any daylight between them. It is true that governments like the American government and the Australian government are pretty much in the pockets of the large fossil fuel industries.

And a lot of the poisoning that is going on around us is the result of the activity of those big industries. I mean, for example, we are moving away from coal and we’re moving away from oil and the oil industry is now so frightened that it’s putting all its efforts into developing new petrochemical products that are all going to be toxic. And the classic example is plastics. The reason the world is flooded with plastics is that oil companies were no longer able to make so much profit from motor fuels.

So they transferred their effort to value-added plastics and other products, including pharmaceuticals. So, they’re just shifting the playing field underneath our very feet to keep on polluting the world that we live in. And that’s got to stop. I mean, there is such a thing as green chemistry, which is chemistry that is harmless and that involves recycling of things. It’s pretty innocuous.

We need to be doing much more of that. So that’s not going to happen unless consumers put the pressure on manufacturing companies and others to stop doing the bad stuff and start doing the right stuff. So there has to be a risk and reward process set up. We’re going to have to pay companies to produce sustainable, safe, healthy products. It’s going to cost more money. But that’s to happen if we want to stop dying of these horrible diseases.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, it’s this idea of seemingly cheap food and products are not so cheap when health and environmental costs have factored into the cost of these low cost products. We need a more holistic way of accounting for it. And we’re going to come to one of those in a moment. And I know you are going through a revision of this 2014book as we speak really, aren’t you? Is that what you’re working on now, Julian?

Julian Cribb: Oh, yes, it is. So I’m working on a book for Cambridge University Press, which updates all the information in there goes to the very latest science. And since I write Poisoned Planet about six years ago, seven years ago, there’s been a tremendous amount of new science, particularly medical research that come to light that makes the connection between various chemicals and various diseases.

I think we’ve gone through the same phase that the world went through with tobacco back in the1980s and 1990s and things like that, where there was huge denial on the part of the industry. There was mounting evidence on behalf of the surgeon general and everybody else that cigarettes can kill you. But even so, it took a tough and bloody struggle to get the acceptance that cigarettes produce all these7,000 different chemicals, any of which can kill you. So they’re bad for your health. It took a long, long time.

But we have to make the same argument about plastics, about additives to our food. There something like 16,500 different chemicals can get in your food. The number has magnified in the last 30, 40 years, dramatically, more chemicals used on farm, more chemicals used in food processing, more chemicals in food packaging. It’s a very alarming state of affairs and very little monitoring going on worldwide.

Julian Cribb: The Americans test the blood of their people and guess what they find? They find that nearly every American is a walking contaminated site. They’re absolutely full of industrial chemicals and carcinogens and other studies have shown this goes right way back to infancy and even into the womb. Babies are now being born with a load of 200industrial chemicals already in their blood. We’re in a dire situation.

But what has not happened is there has not been a focus on this issue like there has been with climate change and the intergovernmental panel on climate change, there hasn’t been a worldwide focus on this. Scientists have been talking about it, consumers have been talking about it, but there has not had anything like the profile, scientifically speaking, of the climate issue.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Yes. Well, then another book that you wrote was called and very pressing title considering what we are going through in this year of 2020, but it was, Surviving The 21stCentury. I mean there’s a catchy title if ever you wanted one for the 21stcentury. Tell us about that book.

Julian Cribb: Well, this fed into the end of history idea that a lot of people were forecasting the end of history. And this book answers that question. What are the risks? So basically I reduced the risks to 10 major lists, but they’re all interconnected. They all come out of human overpopulation and overuse of resources, overexploitation of the earth. So all of them fall out of that, but they got all that included nuclear war, they include the chemical poisoning thing we’ve just mentioned. They include uncontrolled new technologies like artificial intelligence and mass surveillance and things like that.

So what I did was I took each one of those threats and I described the threat as science sees it and the debate around it, scientifically. And then I listed the solutions from a human species point of view. But I also put in a little box at the end saying, “This is what you can do in your life to live more safely, to help change humanity away from this suicidal course, basically.” Because these things taken together will almost certainly bring down civilization if we do not fix them. And in several combinations, they could actually extinguish us as a species.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: And one of them of course was pandemic disease.

Julian Cribb: Yeah. And the pandemic disease is connected with all of the others because it comes out of the fact that we’re extinguishing wild animals all the way around the world. So viruses that live in bats and pangolins and God knows what, have to go and live in the human compost heap because it’s the biggest available bunch of carbon on the planet for them to survive in. They’ve got no choice. They’re not enough bats left. We’re cutting down the rainforest where all these animals lived and that is bringing humans into closer contact. So that’s allowing the spillover, the transmission from one species to another to take place.

Normally you don catch foreign viruses from other animals, it takes an awful lot of effort to get a breakthrough of a virus into human beings. And the circumstances have to be exactly right for it to occur. But we are creating those circumstances more and more often. And of course, in our airline travel and childminding centres and things like that, we’ve created the perfect crucible for viruses to travel and be shared around the world.

Viruses are not very smart, no, they’re just looking for a good feed or somewhere nice to breed. We provide them with lots of cells that are very suitable for them to reproduce in. That’s what we’re doing. So, it’s human behaviour that causes pandemics, not the viruses themselves. But our behaviour is leading us more and more to these types of accidents, you might say.

A classic example was HIV/AIDS. It’s killed 36 million people since it first emerged from the rainforests in the late 1950s. And it quite possibly was started by a polio vaccine that was contaminated and that has never been disproved. There’s a lot of scientific evidence for that. So these are the kinds of theories we need to look at. For the same reason, we need to know how the Coronavirus got out of the laboratory or the wet market or wherever it got out of. We have to know how these things start, else we won’t be able to stop them.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Another one of those 10 threats that you identified was self-delusion, which is particularly an interesting one.

Julian Cribb: Yes. So it’s quite a complicated story. Humans have beliefs for a very good biological reason. If you were walking across the Savannah, say a million years ago, and a tiger or a lion jumps out at you, you don’t sort of stand around and check everything out and form an educated judgment about what’s going on, you just get straight up a tree, don’t you? What has happened in that instance is that your senses have detected a threat and your mind has painted in the rest of the picture.”Oops, it might be a lion.” Oh, it turned out it was only some wild pig or something else like that. But what you’ve done is you’ve painted a belief and that belief saved your life. So that’s what beliefs are actually for.

But as society emerged and we got more complicated beings, we began to attribute the beliefs to God or traditional stories and things like that. Now we have a situation where the beliefs are getting totally out of control. They are being manipulated by all sorts of people, by politicians, by religious people, by money marketeers, by filmmakers, by all sorts of people. They’re playing on our capacity for beliefs, to give us a false view of the world. And if we have false view of the world, a false understanding, the threats are very much more likely to actually destroy us.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, one thing to write a book, of course, Julian, and you’ve written a few as you’ve mentioned, but it’s another one to inspire a university. In fact, one of Australias leading universities, the ANU, the Australian National University in Canberra, to form a commission, the Commission for The Human Future. And your book, Surviving the 21st Century, actually did lead to just that thing. Can you tell us a little bit about the Commission for The Human Future?

Julian Cribb: Yeah, sure. A lot of the credit goes to Professor Bob Douglas, a retired epidemiologist from the ANU who read the book and thought that there was something in my arguments and that people ought to be aware of all the threats that we face. And we ought to start coming up with some solutions. And he staged a large round table at the ANU of about 50 academics from all different disciplines. And the result of that was, “Yes, we should do something.” And at that time, the former Liberal leader, John Hewson, was a Professor.

He still is a Professor at the ANU. And he suggested that one of the things we could do was actually form a commission whose purpose was to inform people, given the scientific advice about the nature of the threats we face, and to bring people together to try to come up with rational, sensible and lasting solutions to them.

So that was what got the Commission for The Human Future off the ground. We’ve had one roundtable where we discussed the threats in general. We’re about to discuss the food threat as our next topic. And we’ll just go on rolling all the way through the threats and the opportunities, over the coming year or two.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, I know the report in, I think it is March of 2020, just tabled its first, well I don know whether it was the first report, but it’s report, Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century. And we’ll definitely have links to that downloadable report. It’s about 38 pages, brilliant really. And the show notes for this podcast. And as you say, brings together an array of experts in a very holistic way of thinking that none of these, in fact, 10 existential threats as they’re called, act in isolation. Do they?

Julian Cribb: No. They’re all connected. And this is the point. You have to come up with solutions that crosscut all of them. You cannot solve one threat if you’re going to make another threat worse, that does not make humanity any safer. So for example, if you try and solve the food crisis by pouring more fossil fuels and chemicals on the land, you’re only going to make the climate crisis and the ecological crisis and the human poisoning crisis, all these other crises, worse. So what we’re doing at the moment to increase food production is actually making several other crises much worse. We have to, in other words, reinvent food, we have to go for renewable food. So it’s not pillaging the earth to grow our food.

So those are examples of the kinds of changes that we’re likely to recommend to people. And we want to inform not only politicians and industry but particularly the person in the street, the average citizen, what they can do in their lives to make this a safer earth for their grandchildren.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, I think I’ve heard you give us statistics which stuck in my mind, that topsoil is being lost at the rate of, did I get this right? 75 billion tonnes a year or something like that. Anyway, a huge amount. I had the pleasure of talking to John Hewsonin recent weeks and he was mentioning that regenerative agriculture was an important part of many of these solutions.

Julian Cribb: Yes. He is absolutely right. I mean, we cannot feed ourselves if we devour the earth by so doing, that’s just a dead end. So if we destroy the soil’s base and the water base and the ecological base for agriculture, we are not going to be able to feed 10 billion people in the 2060s. And you add to that climate change, that going to damage agriculture more than somewhat.

The system we’ve got for producing food at the moment will not last. It’s not sustainable, so it has to be replaced with something new. I dealt with that in my book, Food or War, I described a system that is sustainable. How we can produce food sustainably, a circular system where we keep on renewing the food supply from the nutrients that we’ve got. We don have to plunder the earth any longer or cut down any more rain forests to grow enough food for ourselves or produce enough food.

So the point is that these things sound dire and grim, but there are solutions there and the solutions are all capable of making us wealthier, happier, more prosperous of improving our wellbeing, improving our health, improving our relationship with the natural world. The solutions actually offer us a wonderful future, if we can only get our head around them and get them implemented.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Yes. I mean it ticks so many boxes you can only wonder why. The other book that I wanted, and you’ve just touched on it as well, you’re more recent book in 2019, Food or War. And I was particularly struck by the fact that Professor Paul R. Ehrlich wrote a piece on the from recommending the book as a must read and Professor Ehrlich was a guest on our podcast also last year. Tell us a little bit more about that book, the issues you mentioned, the circular economy. Can you expand on the concept of the circular economy a bit more?

Julian Cribb: Yeah, sure. Basically Food or War, the hypothesis there is that when people don’t have enough to eat or they haven’t got enough lands to produce it or enough water to produce it, they fight. And the evidence is we’ve been doing that for 20,000 years. So what is a country? A nation? Anation is a line drawn around basically your farms and your fishing rights, your fishing grounds. It protects your food resources.

Everybody is conscious of their food resources. And World War II began because Hitler wanted the Russian farmlands for German farmers. That was the primary motive for his starting World War II. You can go into the German history books and find that out. So this contest over food resources underlies two-thirds of the human conflicts that we have seen through history.

So if we want to not fight in the 21st century and not risk a devastating nuclear war, then we need to get the food thing right first. But if we get the food thing right, if we produce a sustainable food system, then we are going to be able to re-wild half of the area now occupied by our farms and grazing lands. So we’re going to be able to end the sixth extinction. We’re going to have a much healthier diet that we’ve got at the moment. And basically, we’re going to simply turn over our food supply.

And let me just illustrate this with a city. There is no city on earth that can feed itself at the moment. They all import their food from miles away, where it’s generally produced by a process of mining the topsoil and the water and the environment. And that’s an unsustainable system.

If however you captured all the nutrients that pass through that city on their way to the tip or on their way to the sewage farm or something like that and you put them back into food production in one form or another, growing algae which you feed fish, which you feed to consumers, that sort of thing. If you did that, most of our cities could in fact feed themselves.

Julian Cribb: So part of the idea here is that we have cities semi self-sufficient in climate proof food. And that’s not hard to achieve, may be expensive, but it’s not hard to achieve. It’s physically quite possible and people are doing it all around the world now anyway. So that’s going to be one of the big changes, that food production is going to come back into the cities to make cities more food secure than they are at the moment.

In COVID we’ve seen the food system nearly break down because it has to come from thousands of kilometres away in a series of ships and trucks and planes and what have you. That’s a very vulnerable system when you have to fight a pandemic at the same time. Sowe needs to produce more food locally and we need to do it by these modern methods of intensive food production in cities and also in the deep oceans. There’s a huge scope for aquaculture, both of plants and fish in the deep oceans, which we have not even scratched the surface of yet.

So all of these processes are part of what’s known as the circular economy, which is everything we throw away, we don’t actually waste, we just take it back into the production process again. It’s the same as your aluminium can. 86% of the aluminium in the world today gets recycled into new tin cans or new aluminium products. So if we can repeat, replicate that for nutrients and for other metals and for building materials and for clothing, textile fibres, then we have solved the problem of the throwaway society, of the endless growth society. You can have endless growth, provided it’s in a circle and not in a straight line. That’s the point.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:  Yeah. One last thing I wanted to ask you and I ask my guests this often, taking a step back from your role over many years as a science writer and clearly an observer of the world on many levels because we’re all on this journey now together. I wondered if you might share with us what you thought was the biggest challenge that we as individuals face in our modern world on our journey through life.

The Biggest Health Challenge

Julian Cribb: Well, I have concluded in all of these books that it is possible to solve the problems that we’ve got. It is technically quite feasible to fix all of these problems. You can ban nuclear weapons, you can ban fossil fuels, you can recycle your food, et cetera, et cetera. The solutions are obvious in most cases. But before you can do that, you’ve got to wake everybody up to the fact that we’ve got a problem. And nine-tenths of the world doesn’t know we’ve got a problem and they’re just going their own blind, happy, ignorant way.

So the real task is an educational one, an informational one. It’s science communication, which is what I do. It’s sharing the knowledge that scientists keep with the wide 7, nearly 8 billion people on the planet today, so they can implement it in their daily lives and in the consumer decisions that they make. And I think that’s the big challenge. We’ve got the technology to solve all our problems. We do not have the institutions, nor do we have the level of education that is necessary to solve them. So it is on the human side that we actually fall down.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well Julian, you are playing your very significant part in this with your writings. And I want to thank you so much for joining us today. We’ll have links to your books, your website, and that commission report. And thank you again.

Julian Cribb: Thanks very much indeed, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: Well, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to Julian. That’s why I invited him. I think I’ve mentioned to our listeners that I have the honour of being President of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine. We are currently well, right through May and June, putting on an eight week conference called Environmental and Viral Disruptors: Rising to the challenge, Reducing the risk and Future Proofing Humanity.

And Julian has presented three presentations at that conference. Each of those books that we touched on, the Poisoned Planet, Surviving the 21st Century and Food or War, all about food security. And of course, his work as I mentioned, inspired the formation at ANU, of the Commission for The Human Future. The chair of that was Professor John Hewson, and he opened the ACNEM Conference.

So the ACNEM Conference touches on so many issues that Julian talked about in this podcast. And of course, he covers so many issues we cover in this podcast. And if you wanted to go back and listen to Allan Savory for example, and that’s why we’re issued Allan Savory’s very inspiring episode where he talked about holistic context. That before governments, before organizations, before individuals make any specific decision, they need to view it in a more holistic context.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: And Julian was referring to the Commission for The Human Future and he touched on 10existential threats which his book and the commission have focused on and they are, ecological collapse in extinction. We are going through the sixth great extinction. Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, of course, resource scarcity, global poisoning, food insecurity, pandemic disease, population, uncontrolled technology. And the last one, which is perhaps the most interesting because unless we get this one right, none of this is going to change, and that is self-delusion.

So we’ll have links to all of Julian’s resources. I would encourage you to read his book, to download the report from the Commission for The Human Future and leave us any comments on Facebook. And don’t forget to go on to iTunes and leave us a good review because the more reviews, the higher we go up on the ratings and this message gets out there to more people.

We’ve got some really exciting things planned in this really amazing year we find ourselves all in. Has there never been a more important time to focus on health, not just of yourself, not just of your family and community, but of our whole planet. As I often says, we are all connected, so we are all affected. So until next time, this is Dr Ron Ehrlich, be well.

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.