What's this one?

Hmmm...

That's called the horseshoe crab.

Horseshoe crab. I have seen that that crab before.

You have? Yeah.

At the Conservancy.

Right! Yeah, at the Nature Conservancy.

'That's my friend, Bill Weir. He's in the middle of story time with his four-year-old son, River.

What's that?

That's a moose.

Right!

I'm so smart.

Yes. You are so smart.

You've probably heard Bill over the years tell quite a few stories. As CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent. He's also the host of the documentary series, "The Wonder List."

Didn't know I'd be going from sea level beaches to 1000ft higher than the tallest ski mountain in the continental U.S.. Welcome to the peak of Maunakea.

'Now Bill recently added another title to his already impressive resume -- author. His first book is called "Life as We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World," and the book was published this month. When you read it, you'll find that the book begins with a letter that Bill wrote to River. It was just a few weeks after he was born, in April of 2020.

Dear River, against all odds, you were conceived in a lighthouse, born into a pandemic, learned to crawl amid democratic and industrial revolutions, and have tasted just enough of life as we know it to resent us when it's gone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry we broke the sea and sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale. I'm sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon much more than the Amazon, and that the waterfront neighborhood where you were growing up could be condemned by rising seas before you're old enough to apply for a mortgage.

Now Bill actually shared an early version of this letter with me on the podcast four years ago, back when it was focused on the Covid 19 crisis. And while the days of Covid lockdown have come and gone, global temperatures have continued to climb. Storms and wildfires have gotten more severe, more frequent. And earlier this month, the UN's Climate Chief, Simon Stiell, said basically that we have two years left to save the planet.

We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans now.

'It can all feel pretty overwhelming. I think a lot about climate issues and the impact on health -- a growing spread of vector borne diseases like Lyme and Malaria, an increase in respiratory problems, a rise and strokes and a lot of heat related illness. Despite all this, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Bill is optimistic. He's optimistic about the planet, and he's optimistic about our ability to take care of it. I wanted to find out why. What we can all do to help and what made him end his letter to River, like this:

Climate change on a degraded planet is not a problem created or solved by physics or technology. It is a problem created and solved by stories. River, you have a good shot at seeing the 22nd century. And when you get there, I want you to tell them how we came together, sorted out our shit, and wrote a better story.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, and this is Chasing Life.

Let me just say I am, I am super excited to talk to you, man.

Thank you.

I, I send you notes after your pieces is run on television, after your documentaries run. And part of the reason that I do that is because I think your reporting is the only thing that my family watches collectively. They don't even watch my stuff collectively. They love your reporting. It's really good, obviously, but I think there's a larger thing in here because I have teenage daughters, three teenage daughters, and they're getting a lot of their information from all these different sources. But when it comes to climate, there's a lot of garbage out there. And I think they're in search of honest brokers. Like what to believe Dad, what to believe. And it's hard. It's hard to find out what to actually hang your hat on and regard as truth, isn't it?

'It really is. And I think sort of media hygiene is as much of a key to our survival as carbon capture and other, you know, more earth science-y ideas because we all need to be on the same page with this stuff.

The last time we talked on a podcast was around this time of year, right, right around Earth Day back in 2020.

Right.

'And it was weird times - pandemic lockdown; people were sick and scared; and River had just been born. And you wrote this letter to to him and you shared part of the letter with us. I think you were still in the process of formulating the letter at that point.

I was.

I'm just wondering if you could take us back to that time. Bill, April

Sure.

2020. What did you want to accomplish with that letter?

Well, I became a new old dad at the height of the pandemic in 2020. At that point, my daughter Olivia was 16. And as I look down at this little squiggling bundle of joy in my arms and realized this kid is going to live to see the 22nd century. And as I started writing sort of a letter of apology to him for the the planet we broke that he was moving into, the more I paid attention to the dreamers and the doers and the solution finders, you know, the best tip I ever got covered in disaster was Mister Rogers, who said when he saw a scary event on TV, his mother told him to look for the helpers. There's always helpers rushing into disasters. And when I'm really down and I've just spent a morning drinking from the firehose of peer reviewed studies about different ways the planet is falling to pieces, I need to look for the helpers. Not just people who are managing communities in the aftermath of something like the wildfire in Lahaina or after a hurricane, but also the folks who are looking for better ideas and ways to fix the problem and to create healthier, more sustainable, resilient pieces of our lives. Everything you look around can be improved upon. So I'm now on my fourth Earth Day letter to River, and I'm focusing on on some of the helpers that inspired me most in the last year. But you know, Sanjay, I'll be honest, I was supposed to turn this book in two years ago, and so much sort of happened in the climate space. The conversation changed in such fundamental ways. I now have a lot more wonder than worry when I when I think about this story.

'I wanted to to really congratulate you and writing this book - "Life as We Know It (Can Be): stories of People, Climate and Hope in a Changing World." It's a great book, and I think it's gonna be one of these books that really, holds up during the test of time.

Oh thanks.

It's inspired by Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Can you sort of explain how you approached this? The the hierarchy of needs, climate change, how did you put this all together?

'Well, when I sat down and really, it was sort of the letters, the Earth Day letters to River were going to be a book. And I knew that I wanted it to be coming from the point of view of how to build a life on this planet that we built for him, where's the safest place to live? What kind of house to build? How do you heat and cool that house? You know what kind of food will you grow up eating? What what communities look like? To me, it comes down to wants and needs. You know, what kind of house do you want? What kind of house do you need? And that sent me down the rabbit hole of Abraham Maslow, who I fell in love with as a character, sort of a giant of psychology. And he wrote in 1939, a theory on human motivation, which we think of as the pyramid of needs, even though it didn't take that shape in the paper. But it's the idea that there are five, if you imagine a five layer pyramid, and the ground floor layer one is just the stuff that keeps you alive - air, water, temperature around 68° degrees Fahrenheit, right amount of minerals, sleep. If you don't get those, nothing else matters. Level two is your safety needs. That's clothing and shelter and rule of law and an economy and health care. Level three and four are love and esteem. You want to belong to somebody, a tribe. You want to be respected within that tribe. And then the peak, he called it self-actualization. Whatever you should be, you should be. Sanjay Gupta is an example of a self-actualized human being, in that you are meant to be a doctor who helps people, a communicator, and you do it at the highest levels. And and so Maslow became obsessed with those kinds of folks, the generals and CEOs, and studied mental health in that way. And he thought, man, if we can just figure out how to meet people's needs, we can create this peace table. World War II broke out and he and he said, I want people to understand we're just all trying to fill the same needs. And and Maslow in this in his paper, acknowledges this is written at a time of peaceful abundance where, you know, emergency conditions are rare in the United States. And then it sort of clicked for me is like, what if you can no longer take for granted the the bottom of our pyramids like I did? I never thought about where my water came from or the quality of my air, or I worked in construction as a teenager. I never thought, why do we build houses with skinny walls and giant furnaces instead of the other way around? And, and now this new generation where we can't count on reliable weather patterns anymore, water cycles that go from drought to flood. We can't take water for granted anymore when we can see the wildfire smoke from, you know, New York City to Seattle. We can't take air for granted anymore. When we need to reduce our dependance on fossil fuels and at the same time live comfortable lives, we can't take our shelter for granted anymore.

I'm gonna come back to to climate for a second. But let me let me just ask you something. How are you doing? Because I and I'm asking you in a in a brotherly way, but you cover some really heady topics and there's a lot of politics involved. But that aside, just the idea that we're spiraling towards this, this problem, that our kids are contemplating the end of the world.

Yeah.

I never thought, you know, the world might end. It just wasn't part of the thinking. Right? How are you taking care of yourself? How do you how are you doing?

'The first couple of years I was on this beat, I got really dark. When you sit and you talk to climatologists, paleo climatologists, people who really understand the physics of what's what's happening, there's some terrifying things that are happening. It is very easy to spiral. And I think and I get into this in the book and I went looking for advice. You know, there are now eco anxiety support groups. There are therapists who specialize in solastasia, the idea that you're you have to mourn a place that you still live in because it's changing so dramatically. And as I sort of fell in love with the ideas of Maslow, I came across Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who came up as best known for the five stages of grief denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I sort of, at a certain point realized there is a climate grief. And there's a lot of anger, a lot of depression. But ultimately, until you get to acceptance, that's what turns people from survivors, you know, into thrivers or leads to a more peaceful end. Now Al Gore hated this analogy when I brought it up for him because he's like, we're not terminal. And you know, we can't give up. We can, there's still life to be saved. But I really believe that we need to process the idea that, the fish that you caught as a kid, it's now too hot for them to spawn in that place again and that they won't be there for your grandkids. We have to deal with that. And then it's a matter of, well, how can we save it? What's the cost of saving them?

So, part of it. Sanjay, to be honest, I'm making it. It's up as I go along. You know, my my dad used to say when I'd complain, he's like, good thing you're tough. Or, you know, I would complain and he'd say, so what? And then the next word was next. So what next? Okay, that happened to you. So what are we doing now? And so, I don't know, I'm going to have to raise River to have a little bit of that toughness, you know, and, and a sense of empathy for folks around him who may not have it and, try to get you to acceptance, whether it's drought acceptance, water acceptance, you know, this is the problem. And here's how we're going to band together and fix it.

'Yeah. Look, I think that last part band together and fix it because I hear what, what I guess Vice President Gore may have been responding to, I think for for Kübler-Ross, the idea of acceptance was, a terminal diagnosis, you know, and is that what we're saying about the planet? And let me preface it by this. You know, it's funny. I don't know if it's if it's like this with you and Olivia, but, there's times when I'd be driving around my daughters and their friends. And when you're the driver, you can listen in, conversations in a sort of very surreptitious way.

Right.

And one of the things that really strikes me when I listen to not just my teenage girls, but other other girls, their friends, is that they do view the world differently. For example, the idea of them wanting to have families, wanting to have children. I don't know what the percentages are. This is all very anecdotal, but I'm guessing it's gone down in terms of that, that sort of deep rooted desire to start families. And I think part of what's driving that, if I ask my own kids, is this, grudging acceptance that the world is going to be very different. That they, they hear the climate change reports that say, hey, look, if we don't get our act together in a couple of years, it's it's all for naught. And I'm not I'm not trying to make you, you know, sort of evaluate all of this data that's coming in. But just as a dad, if Olivia said, look, I don't, dad I'm not interested in having a family and and having kids. If River tells you that one day. Would that surprise you? What would you think?

'It wouldn't, to be honest. I think the thing that I come down on is that procreation is one of our most primal purposes, you know, and nature wants, a generation to to build on and prove, your genetic line or whatever. You know, the biology of it is it's one of our most primal things. Not to mean that everybody needs to become parents, but I think we need all the good help we can get. But do it with eyes wide open and do it knowing that I'm going to have to think about the bottom of this kid's pyramid of needs and and how they can help other people fulfill theirs. And you know, the big takeaway for me in this whole pyramid Maslow idea is that right now, we're trying to fill our love and esteem needs online with virtual likes, with yoga retreats, with spending sprees, cruises, whatever. And it's not filling it up, right? But if we from I've learned from this sort of the happiest, healthiest communities around the world, indigenous communities that are really well connected to their environment and each other, it is taking care of water and soil and air, and around them that fills those love and esteem needs in ways that we can't imagine in our modern, convenient world. You know, we've we live in the golden age of self-isolation, whereas we need each other more than ever.

You said something when I was watching your reporting. I guess it was summer of last year. I'll never forget this. I've quoted you many times. I'm not going to get it exactly right. But as hot as last summer was, it may have also been the coolest summer remaining in our in our lifetime.

Right.

That really I, that just sort of really consolidated it for me. It was hot. It's getting hotter. Yeah. In fact, that was as cool as it's going to be. How would you if you're the if I'm a human doctor and you're sort of the earth doctor, how would you rate the health of the planet right now?

'It's critical. The two things that could shut down life as we know it at once. And that's a virus, as we saw with Covid, or like a big solar storm that just knocks out grids and satellites and something like that. But when it comes to weather events, still, even as they get worse, it's it's regional, it's local, and not everybody feels the same hurricane at the same time. And so you think like, well, those unlucky folks, you know, they'll rebuild. And you just we have that mindset of that was just a bad a bad luck event. Not that this is an entirely new normal. And with the heat, it's just insidious. But conversations around geoengineering are getting a lot more steam these days. And people use the medical analogy that if you have a patient that's crashing, you may need some temporary medicine for a while to cool them off. If they have a fever that is literally cooking them, you got to put them in ice and you know, and do these things. And that is the argument for basically using planes or rockets or balloons to put aerosol in the atmosphere, salt water, something natural, but basically mimicking a volcano. After Mount Pinatubo in Philippines erupted in the 90s, it cooled off the planet by a full degree for two years. It just that was enough shade. And they're like, well, what if we bought time? You know, because things are heating up much faster than, than were predicted. And we need time to build. We need time to fortify coastal cities and adjust for, you know, feet of sea level rise if that's coming in. And there's so many critics to this. Some countries have already outlawed it. Mexico shut it down. The idea that we would intentionally spray sunscreen in the sky is horrifying to enough people. It would be a really tough political lift, even though we're already altering the stratosphere with airplane traffic. James Hansen, the original, the OG of climate warning, sort of the head of NASA's Goddard says that we have to, we're at a point now where we have to consider these "in-case-of-emergency break-glass" ideas.

'After the break - why reducing carbon emissions could lower climate anxieties. And also what camels can teach us about adapting to hotter climates.

When I started training, you know, I've been a doc for 30 years. If you had metastatic melanoma when I graduated medical school, that was a death sentence 30 years ago. And Jimmy Carter had metastatic melanoma and essentially was cured of it. And that also was in my lifetime. And if if the analogy is to earth the same thing. How optimistic are you that there will be these big solutions, techno rescue I guess I've heard it called. That will actually be employed in some way.

'That's a fascinating question. And I do think if even if you just look back at the world before 2015, when the Paris Climate Accords were signed, the emissions track was putting us towards like five degrees Celsius of warming, you know, just ten degrees Fahrenheit warm, which means you can't go outside. It's like literally turning the tropics into Dune the movie, right? Well, we've have that since then. Right now it's 2.6. is the trajectory. Not great! Still going to lose a lot of coral reefs and a lot of mountain ice. And who knows what's going to happen to the poles. And maybe with technology and policy - bend it down to 2.4. That's so much better than the hell we were destined for before people took this seriously and started talking about it. So yeah, I think the same frontal lobes that built this problem can can help fix it if everybody is on the same page. We have to reinvent life is around us as we know it and break our addiction to to this fuel that we've that is built the modern world and expanded our lives. And and there are technological ways to do this, various nature based ways to do it. But until that happens at scale, Sanjay, we haven't bent the curve like we did with Covid, of fossil fuel planet cooking emissions. It's still going up. Coal went up 2% last year for various economic reasons. And and as long as these companies and all the richest people in the C-suites, and the richest companies ever have some change of heart and realize their grandkids can't spend their inheritance on a dead planet. It's going to be hard. It's going to be hard to save this patient.

One of the things you talk about in the book, and I thought this was interesting because I had never really thought about it this way, how quickly we could adapt. And, and I don't know if you were presenting this in the book as a way to address climate change or just sort of a natural sequence of events. And you mentioned the importance of adaptation, and you use the camel as an example.

Yeah.

Which I thought was really interesting. What can we learn from camels? And our again, I don't want to overstate or minimize. Because adaptations take long periods of time to actually be employed.

Right.

But what can the camel teach us?

Well, I didn't know until I stumbled across this fact. Camels came from Canada. The camels about

I didn't know that either.

Yeah. It's only like 25,000 years ago. The camels were like dodge and bears and jumping over beaver dams. And that big hump of fat was evolved to to give them energy over the winter. And their eyelids were evolved to keep out snowstorms, not sandstorms. And their feet were first like snow shoes, which after a couple of camels got lost and wandered across the Bering land bridge into Asia, discovered that all these tools work great in sand and on long hot desert treks. So they adapted physically, their behavior changed, and yes, this took tens of thousands of years. This is happening in real time with penguins, actually a certain species of penguins, which are adapting and moving with the changes while other species are staying put and trying to nest in standing water and are dying out. Can we do the same thing? We don't have the time, but we have the technology. And so, for example, when we build a city of Phoenix in, you know, in the next 20 years, it's going to be visibly brighter because a scientist at Purdue invented the whitest paint a man has ever known, which reflects 99% of light back into space and can cool a building by 15 degrees. Right. And so that is a camel like adaptation to folks, you know, having to suddenly live in a much hotter place.

Fascinating. I hadn't hadn't considered that. What are there other examples like that? I mean, you know, we see the wildfire season, for example. Are there more air purifiers? Better ventilation. What other sort of, consumer level technologies are you hearing about?

'Well, on the on the cooling side, there's a real push to bring back an old Persian technology. There are wind catchers and qanats, these underwater canals where a big tower catches the breeze and pushes the water down underground, where it cools off and it can cools entire city blocks. So it's a low tech, you know, use just using water and air to do those sorts of things. But then the technology for clothing is getting, you know, for hot suits working in the Middle East, these cool suits that cool you off. Super white clothing as well as that on the heat side, during the oil embargo in the 70s, some really smart scientists at the University of Illinois said, what if we designed a home that use two thirds less energy? You know, if we can up our supply, let's lower our demand. And they're using early computers. They designed a house that was basically a modern version of the Pueblo construction, with really thick, well-insulated walls, southern facing windows that could catch the sunlight in the winter, and a ventilation system that refreshed the air and can really increase air quality as a sort of a side benefit of this. You know, there's all kinds of clean water tech on how to filter and desalinate that, that, if scaled up, could could go a long way into helping us.

There is objective health concerns for for everybody, anybody because of what is happening with the climate crisis. You wrote in the book that all this, all the bad stuff comes out in a warmer world.

Yeah.

Right. And we see it with, with, a lot of, viruses and pathogens that used to be sort of relegated to the tropics that have made their way further and further north. Are those the sorts of health issues that you're you're you're most concerned about, at least in the acute sort of setting in the immediate setting?

Yeah, I think so. Five million people die prematurely every year, just to just from particulate pollution of burning fossil fuels around the world. And so air quality, depending on where you live is, is much deadlier, for folks there. So there's that piece of it. I think the writ large, the heat already kills more people, I think, than all the other disasters combined. And there's new science that that measured even folks who who work in air conditioned factories in Asia. Their productivity goes down as the temperature goes up, you know, whatever by X amount of degrees, because chances are they don't have air conditioning at home and their and their sleep is ruined by, you know, sweltering temperatures in places like that. And then a lot of recent reporting has come out as, as there are more full surveys done of post disaster illness, disease, injury that is bigger than we think. You know, you it broke your leg when a tree fell in a storm. That's an obvious one after a hurricane when the sun comes out. Your problems are just beginning, you know, because you got the mold on the drywall and the kids can't go back to school. And and it's one thing after another. So the mental health toll on on sort of the disaster generation is something we fully don't understand.

You know, when you when you were covering the wildfires in Maui, you did these incredible interviews. And I'd watch him sometimes I'd rewind and watch it again just to hear what these guys had to say. I needed to process it. There was the chief of the ocean safety for the city, and he said this thing, and I wrote it down. I'm gonna read it to you. I just want to get your your reflection on it. What we've done that has set us down the wrong path was we took care of the people and not the place. When you take care of the place, the place will take care of the people. When you look at things globally, we as the human race are killing the earth because we're not looking at what the earth needs. And so we really, really need to rethink this process. And that can be a starting point. What did you take away from that conversation?

Well, that man you quoted, Archie Kalepa, is a main inspirational figure in the book. He's a hero of mine because I watch this guy who is sort of a legendary Hall of Fame Water man, lifeguard. And so he was in this one community that somehow got spared his house, his home, and his neighbors became a first responder, do it yourself hub of resilience and comeback. And the way he ran this without any, you know, official help was so inspirational from the way he organized the food and water, the bottom of the pyramids, the way he filled love and esteem needs, the way he delivered medicine, the way it just he to me was a role model of a kid I want to raise in this age where you just make your neighborhood better. And what I've seen covering these disasters, Sanjay, is sudden disaster tends to bring people together. Like hashtag we will rebuild. You're going through the five stages of grief at the same time. Slow motion disaster pulls people apart. And but it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. With the right leadership and the people like Archie Kalepa, bringing people in these moments of pain and making them stronger. I love that guy.

'The abrupt disaster versus the slow moving one. It's so fascinating, really, how differently we respond to each. I learn a lot whenever I speak to Bill. So I asked him in the end what people can do, not just environmental scientists and policymakers, but us -doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, administrators, just about anyone. What can we do to address environmental issues and mitigate risks in our communities?

I say, what do you love? What are you into? If you're a, have a legal mind and you think that your public utility is doing the wrong thing. And you like to attend public meetings. Maybe that's your personality. You can do more good at that level than some people, you know, negotiating at the at the big climate conferences sometimes. There was a artist in Miami suburb, who started the underwater homeowners association, where they would put yard signs, where the elevation of every home, which started a conversation about preparedness and resiliency. Out west in the United States, they've fallen back in love with beavers, beavers to rehabilitate wetlands. Everybody loves beavers again because they slow down water. And now people are, clubs are getting together to go both reinforce beaver dams to make them last longer, or to build artificial ones, even in arid places like Arizona. If you rearrange the rocks on a landscape to to slow down the rain as it falls, you can bring back vegetation and wildlife, drawdown carbon. It's cheap materials. All you need are neighbors and a little sweat under the sun. You can have a cold one afterwards and talk about weather patterns wherever you are. I just want folks to connect with each other and nature in the best possible ways.

Bill is sort of a hero in our household, and he is an inspiration to me as a journalist and as a doctor. He's always looking for that sweet spot between honesty and hope, between worry and wonder, and I always aim to try and do the same thing. After all, in medicine, like climate, you inevitably end up sharing news that people might not want to hear. So I think the best thing you can do is point out where there is still hope, while also starting from a place of honesty. Look, there's no doubt that Bill is very clear that carbon emissions, rising sea levels, intense wildfires, all those things are taking a significant toll on the planet and on our human health. But he also highlights potential solutions, from using heat reflecting paint on houses or buildings, to neighbors working to rebuild the community after a climate disaster. I guess the reason I was excited to talk to him is because Bill makes me feel a little bit more optimistic about the world that our kids are inheriting.

'Next week on Chasing Life - my CNN colleague Meg Tirrell, what she's going to be doing is unpacking unprocessed foods with nutrition experts, and what she finds is probably going to change the way that you shop for groceries.

Well, I guess that's sort of the question is when you say linked and when can you say ultra processed foods cause health problems?

Well, you can do that when you have a controlled clinical trial. And guess what? We have one.

'And one more thing before I let you go. The team is already hard at work on our next season of the podcast. It's going to be our 10th season and we want to hear from you. Leave us a message at (470) 396-0832 and tell us this: how do you chase life? Your message could be used on an upcoming episode.

Chasing life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Jennifer Lai and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lichteig, with support from Jamus Andrest, Jon Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Leni Steinhardt, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealey, and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.