• Read an excerpt from the book
• Mark Hertsgaard’s blog
• Climate change at the National academies
• Fighting drought with trees in Burkina Faso
• Report from the National Academy of Sciences

Mark Hertsgaard and his daughter Chiara (courtesy Mark Hertsgaard)

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Being a good journalist generally means putting aside your own emotions and personal biases in favor of an impartial assessment of the facts. It’s a tough challenge sometimes, especially when the facts of a story are stark and the choices they present are urgent.  It becomes even harder when you suddenly have an emotional investment in the outcome of a story. That’s a situation journalist Mark Hertsgaard found himself in when he set out to write a book about climate change and the ways the world is and is not dealing with it.  Right about the same time he became a father for the first time and that caused him to see the story quite differently. Hertsgaard’s new book is Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, and it puts his five year old daughter front and center. Mark Hertsgaard, how did becoming a dad change your engagement with the climate change story?

Mark Hertsgaard: Well, I guess, you know I covered that story for 15 years by then and I certainly felt engaged by the emotional stakes.  I mean we’re talking about an environmental threat that really could destabilize civilization as we know it. But when my daughter was born, it’s not just that I became a dad, it’s also that the climate problem underwent a paradigm shift.  For the first 15 years that I was covering it climate change was always something that could still be prevented if the world got its act together. Then in 2005 when my daughter was born I interviewed the chief science advisor to the British government, Sir David King, and he basically shattered that framing of the story, and he said, ‘No, climate change has begun and because of the inertia of the climate system, we’re now locked in to another 50 years of rising temperatures and to a certain amount of very substantial climate change.’ And that inevitably made me think about the kind of life my daughter will have as she grows up.

Werman: So you spent five years researching and reporting Hot.  Were there moments that unexpectedly grabbed you as a father that wouldn’t have before you became a parent?

Hertsgaard: Yes, I think so.  I live in California and we are going to lose most of the snowpack above the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is the source of most of our state’s fresh water.  And when I first interviewed the scientist about that I walked out of there thinking oh, my gosh, what is Chiara going to do?  What are we going to do to get water for her? And then of course, being in Bangladesh and looking at the father of a little girl who is exactly my daughter’s age, whose village had just been washed away in floods, and you think wow, this man, he surely loves his daughter just as much as I love mine, and he’s got a lot less wherewithal to deal with this problem.

Werman: Now, one of the key points you make in the book is that we’re already past the point where we can prevent serious disruption from climate change.  So you seek out examples of places where people are successfully coming up with ways of adapting and changing the way they do things. You reported actually on one of these for this program a couple of years ago in Burkina Faso in west Africa where you found farmers involved in a local tree planting project.  Remind us about that.

Hertsgaard: Well, that example in western Africa is, I think, the single most hopeful that I came across while writing Hot.  And it’s because, I think, these are some of the poorest people on earth.  They are illiterate farmers.  Most of them don’t even know the phrase “climate change” and yet they’re living climate change.  And they are using indigenous knowledge to adapt.  And small correction, they’re not planting trees, they are growing trees.  They’re too poor to plant trees, but what they do is allow trees to grow up in their fields of millet and sorghum, and those trees provide shade.  Their root systems irrigate the soil so that when rainfall does come it soaks into the soil.  So we’ve seen enormous increases in productivity and very heartening decreases in the amount of child malnutrition.  So to me that’s a lesson that if some of the poorest people on the planet can do that much in preparing for climate change, surely the rest of us can do even more.

Werman: Now, Mark Hertsgaard, you write if there’s one place you’d want your daughter, Chiara to live, where they’re really dealing with the problem head on, it might be Holland, but this is a country that’s mostly below sea level and probably likely to be under water when Chiara is an adult won’t it?

Hertsgaard: You’re right, of course the Netherlands is, about 70% of the country is below sea level, but the reason I would consider having her live there in the future is that the Dutch government is working the problem and they are putting enormous resources into it.  And not just the Dutch government by the way, this climate program there, which is a 200 year plan…

Werman: Yeah, that’s extraordinary.

Hertsgaard: Is backed and in some ways even pushed by the business community.  So the good news is we know what needs to be done, not only that, cutting edge leaders are already doing it in places like the Netherlands, in places like Seattle, King County, Washington, which is by far and away the leader in the United States for preparing for climate change.  So we have the models out there, but what has been lacking is the political will.

Werman: It struck me that the political will is somehow stymied by the dizzying numbers you put out in your book, and all the efforts in debating these numbers.  When does accounting stop and when does the real work of mitigation begin?

Hertsgaard: Well, the real work of mitigation has become in virtually every other major country in the world except for this one, and that’s something that’s often lost on Americans.  We think that there’s really a debate about climate science, but every other country has long ago settled the question. And that contrasts so sharply to the United States and especially in Washington.  And unfortunately, most of the U.S. mainstream media has treated climate as a political dispute rather than a scientific one.  And they say well on the one hand, on the other hand, and that tends to sap the political will that we need to deal with this crisis.

Werman: I mean I hear your frustration at times in your book.  You sound at times less like a journalist and more like an activist.  And I understand you’ve made a conscious decision to go beyond reporting and writing to directly taking on what you call the climate cranks.  Is there something different about this story on climate change or perhaps about being a father now that motivated that shift?

Hertsgaard: I think so.  I feel that because of 20 years of covering this and because of 20 years of watching the scientific debate evolve, and watching the disinformation campaign against science, I feel that knowing what I know and being a father I cannot pretend that oh, yes, there’s truth on both sides of this.  There’s not.  It’s because we’ve spent the last 20 years denying this problem in the United States at least, that we’re now stuck in this terrible predicament for my daughter and the other children of generation Hot.  They are now locked into 50 years of rising temperatures.  So to that extent yes, I do want to serve as a kind of Paul Revere of climate change and try and wake people up to the realities that are going to change our world in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

Werman: As journalists and parents we’re always weighing the facts and degrees of doubt and certainty to come up with something approaching truth.  How certain are you that the skeptics are wrong and that your emotional engagement as a father is not clouding your judgement?

Hertsgaard: I’m 100% certain that the science that I’m reporting is solid.  When you’ve got the National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in every other major industrialized country, and scores of scientific organizations all saying the same thing in over 20 years, I think of the line of one of the most famous Republicans in this country, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former governor here in California, who said, ‘If 98 doctors tell me that my child needs a life-saving operation and 2 doctors tell me that he doesn’t, I’m going to go with the 98.  And that’s how I feel about climate science.  As a journalist, to me that’s a pretty easy call.

Werman: Mark Hertsgaard, the author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.  Thanks very much for speaking with us.

Hertsgaard: My pleasure, Marco.

Werman: You can find links to the National Academy of Science’s reports on climate change at theworld.org.  That’s also where you can hear Mark Hertsgaard’s 2009 report on farmers responding to climate change in Burkina Faso.  This is PRI.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Note correction to lead: The introduction to this story as broadcast stated that China is not a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol.  China did ratify the treaty, but like other developing countries was not required to make specific reductions in greenhouse gases.

LEAD: Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continue to inch forward.  There’s supposed to be a draft ready by December. That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol. That landmark treaty was supposed to begin the arduous process of turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But the US… which was the world’s major polluter at the time… never ratified the treaty. And Kyoto didn’t require China… which is now the the largest emitter of greenhouse gases… to cut its pollution.

Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table, but time is running out.  And talks last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.”

Meanwhile, people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change. And the news isn’t unremittingly gloomy.   In the arid Sahel region of West Africa, for instance, journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle.  He was there researching a book on living with climate change.  And he sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends in the hot, dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals here are farmers, scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I’d come here hoping to get a glimpse of how Africa might feed itself under a hotter, more volatile climate. Africa already has the highest proportion of malnourished people on earth. And scientists say climate change will hit this continent hard.

I hadn’t meant to do any radio reporting here, but I met a local radio producer and hired him to record some interviews. I felt the story I was finding shouldn’t wait for the book.

The sound he recorded isn’t great, I’m afraid. His equipment was quite basic. Or maybe it was the ferocious heat. Across the border in Mali, it was 114 degrees in Timboctou, making it the hottest city in the world that day.

But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacouba Sawadogo.

Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his gray beard. He can’t read or write. But he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering droughts plaguing his homeland.

Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum, Sawadogo is also growing trees. And the trees, he says, work wonders.

The temperature here is very different than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves, it’s cooler.

That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees’ roots also help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility, so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood.

Sawadogo, I should emphasize, is not planting these trees, like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive, and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts, often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

The trees have helped my family get through good years and bad, Sawadogo says. And he says he’s shared this information with many others. He’s used his motorbike to visit about 100 villages. Others have visited his farm to learn from him.

Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa, but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments seized trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali and neighboring Niger.

Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the region for thirty years, says farmers in Niger alone have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

“This is probably the largest environmental transformation in the Sahel, if not in Africa. There are fifteen to twenty times more trees than there were in 1975, which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.”

Reij says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding… and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change than most western aid programs.

“In the end, what will happen in Africa depends on what farmers will be able to achieve, and they should be the owners of the process, and not outsiders.”

The quiet greening of the western Sahel shows that Africans are not surrendering in the face of mounting climate change. But all forms of adaptation have their limits. If the outside world does not do its part—by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions—even the most resilient African farmers will find it hard to manage. Meanwhile Yacuba Sawadogo is putting his faith in trees.

Trees are like lungs, he says. If we do not protect them and increase their numbers, the earth will fall apart.

For The World, this is Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: This is The World. I’m Lisa Mullins. Negotiations on a new global climate change treaty continued to inch forward. There’s supposed to a draft ready by December. That’s when representatives from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen in hopes of finalizing a successor to the Kyoto protocol. That landmark treaty was supposed to kick start an arduous process turning the world’s economy away from climate-altering fossil fuels. But major polluters such as the United States and China never signed on to Kyoto. Both of those countries are back at the negotiating table but time is running out and last week in Bonn, Germany produced what a top UN official called only “limited progress.” Meanwhile people around the world continue to cope with the effects of climate change and the news is not unremittingly gloomy. In the arid Sahel region of West Africa for instance journalist Mark Hertsgaard recently found something of a small green miracle. He was there researching a book on living with climate change. He sent us this reporter’s notebook from the tiny country of Burkina Faso.

MARK HERTSGAARD: The paved road heading north from Burkina Faso’s capital ends here – in the hot dusty town of Ouahigouya. Most locals are farmers scratching out a living in the savannah that stretches to the horizon on all sides. I come here hoping to get a glimpse of how Africa might feed itself under a hotter more volatile climate. Africa already has the highest proportion of malnourished people on earth and climate change, scientists say, will hit this continent hard. I hadn’t meant to do any radio reporting here but I met a local radio producer and hired him to record some interviews. The sound he recorded isn’t great I’m afraid. His equipment was quite basic. Or maybe it was the ferocious heat. Across the border in Mali it was 114 Degrees in Timbuktu making it the hottest city in the world that day. But the air felt noticeably cooler at the farm of Yacuba Sawadogo.

YACUBA SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Sawadogo wears a brown cotton gown beneath his grey beard. He cannot read or write but he’s pioneering a simple yet ingenious response to the rising temperatures and withering draughts plaguing his homeland. Amidst his fields of millet and sorghum Sawadogo is also growing trees and the trees he says work wonders.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: The temperature here is very different from than in town, Sawadogo says. The forest acts like a pump. The air comes in hot. The shade cools it. So when the air leaves it’s cooler. That shade provides relief from the brutal heat. The trees roots help the earth retain rainfall and their fallen leaves boost soil fertility so crop yields have gone up. Branches provide vital firewood. Sawadogo I should emphasize is not planting these trees like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Matthai has been promoting in Kenya. Sawadogo is growing them. Planting trees is too expensive and most of them die anyway. But young trees sprout naturally every year. What farmers are doing is nurturing those sprouts – often by digging a shallow pit that concentrates scarce rainfall onto the roots.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: The trees have helped my family get through good years and bad Sawadogo says and he shared this information with many others. He’s used his motorbike to visit about 100 villages. Others have visited his farm to learn.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Mixing trees and cropland is an ancient practice in West Africa but it fell out of favor when colonial and corrupt African governments began seizing trees for their own purposes. Recent reforms have reduced such thefts. Now the mixing of trees and cropland is again spreading from farmer to farmer across vast areas of Burkina Faso, Mali, and neighboring Niger where farmers have grown an estimated 200 million trees.

CHRIS REIJ: This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel in not in Africa. There are now 15 to 20 times more trees then there were in 1975 which is completely opposite of what most people tend to believe.

HERTSGAARD: Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who’s been working in the western Sahel since the 1970s, says this form of agro-forestry requires little outside funding and that makes it a more sustainable response to climate change then most western aid programs.

REIJ: In the end, what will happen in Africa depends on what farmers will be able to achieve and they should be the owners of the process and not outsiders.

HERTSGAARD: The quiet greening of the western Sahel shows that Africans are not surrendering in the face of mounting climate change. But all forms of adaptation have their limits. If the outside world does not do its part by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even the most resilient African farmers will find it hard to manage. Meanwhile Yacuba Sawadogo is trusting in trees.

SAWADOGO: [SPEAKING MOORE]

HERTSGAARD: Trees are like lungs, he says. If we do not protect them and increase their numbers the earth will fall apart. For The World this Mark Hertsgaard, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.