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The Current Transcript for December 27, 2017

Host: Catherine Cullen

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

Your recycling could become trash: The 'golden age' of recycling is coming to an end

Guest: Adam Minter

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I just assume there's a plant set kind of separate things. Maybe there's a conveyor belt and they just toss this and toss that.

CATHERINE CULLEN: How much do you really know about where your recycling goes and what happens to it? For most of us it's all a bit mysterious. But for years the answer for much of our recycling waste has been China. Its economy has been hungry for used materials from North America, but that is changing. And as the bottom falls out of the global recycling market, cities and companies across North America are saying a collective, "Oh, oh." That is where we're starting today. Then...

SOUNDCLIP

PETE SOUZA: If I'm going to document his presidency for history, I need to have an open access card and Robert was like, "That's not a problem, the president-elect gets it." And that was basically our conversation

CC: Open access was the one thing Pete Souza said he needed before he agreed to be U.S. President Obama's chief photographer. And over eight years that access allowed him to witness some historic moments - photographing the president as he watched the raid that killed Osama bin Laden; watching Barack Obama privately cope with the horror of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Along the way Pete Souza also became President Obama's friend. Souza will share some stories and talk about the politics photographing a president, in half an hour. And...

SOUNDCLIP

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Climate change is really terrible - coming right at us and we are not doing very much to either adapt or to stave it off. And you think why in the world are we behaving like this?

CC: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wants to know why it can be so hard to talk about climate change. She tells us why she believes fiction could make the conversation a bit easier, in an hour. I'm Catherine Cullen sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

MATT KELIHER: This is the Halifax recycling facility. We have our operation right now sorting curbside recyclables that come in through our blue bag program that's collected curbside everyday in Halifax.

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: There's a lot of plastic here. It's kind of mind-blowing.

MATT KELIHER: There's a bit of plastic, and a lot of other materials that get recycled - paper and cardboard over on the right hand side of the facility there. The gentleman right here is just picking off some of the bags of shrink wrap plastic just so they don't have to go through the lines. The other gentleman here on the loader is just moving some of the materials up the line to get sorted by staff in order to get put to the proper bales in order to find a market.

CC: Here's an unsettling question to consider as you start wrapping paper scraps and empty eggnog cartons into blue recycling bins and bags. What happens if there is no longer a market for all of our recyclables? The question is one that cities around the world are confronting. If no one wants to buy our recycling, it is just trash. China is the biggest importer of recycled materials from countries such as, the U.S. and Canada. But come January 1st China will no longer import a lot of the plastic and paper we've been baling-up and shipping there for decades. And that's creating what many are calling a waste crisis. Back now to that Halifax sorting facility where the manager of waste for the city, Matt Keliher, says he's looking for special permission from the province to dump growing piles of plastic, the size of houses, right into the landfill.

SOUNDCLIP

MATT KELIHER: More than 80 percent of this material would typically end up in China. It does ebb and flow depending on the market and where we can get the best price for the materials. But historically they're the world's largest recycler. They take half of the world's paper and half of the world's plastic and recycle that into new materials. And they're no longer taking our materials and we relied on them to take it. The ultimate challenge for Nova Scotian recyclers is that the province has banned basically every material that you see in this facility from going to landfill. So we're not allowed to put it in the landfill. The challenge is when there's no market to take it, it's not recyclable anymore and it needs to find a home. And unfortunately landfilling is the only available option at this point. It's not the best solution. We want to make sure that material gets recycled. But at the end of the day we need to have that mechanism in place to landfill it. We've put in a request to the province to allow a certain amount of film plastic to be put into a local landfill. We've had yet to hear back from the province. So we've got to look outside of Nova Scotia for options to be able to move our materials in order to make room for the Christmas boom of all of the materials coming in.

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: You have no place to put all this plastic?

MATT KELIHER: That's right. We've ran out of space here at the facility and it's going to become a health and safety hazard. There might be rats and rodents that come because of the material being stored outside and it just degrades over time and ultimately we don't want to send our bad material to a recycling operation and have that turned away. And what we also don't want to have is send them bad material and then they will no longer take any of our materials. So we need to keep in the good books of all recycling operations. That's extremely important right now given the market conditions.

CC: That's waste manager Matt Keliher in Halifax. As he said 80 percent or more of the city's recyclables would normally be sent to China. But the problem he's describing affects cities all over Canada and beyond. Because if no one wants to buy our recycling, then a lot of it will end up in the incinerator or landfill. The Solid Waste Association of North America is asking China to put a pause on the ban and to loosen future restrictions. David Biderman is that group's executive director and CEO.

SOUNDCLIP

DAVID BIDERMAN: Well one of the reasons that we think the Chinese government is going to be willing to listen to this, is China is somewhat dependent on the import of material as feedstock for their manufacturing. There isn't sufficient domestic recyclables in China yet to feed all of the factories and other industries that are currently using the imported materials. And we see that in the dramatic increase in the price that Chinese manufacturers were paying for domestically in China generated material over the last few months. Those numbers have gone up to as high as $500 per tonne, which is more than triple what the imported material was being valued at, at its peak over the summer of 2017.

CC: That was David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America. Now, let's go back to Halifax one more time where our producer Mary-Catherine McIntosh gave a few Haligonians a pop quiz about their recycling.

SOUNDCLIP

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: Do you recycle?

VOICE 1: I do recycle, yes.

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: What do you do to recycle? What kind of effort do you make?

VOICE 1: Well basically separate plastics and cardboard around the house, and compost.

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: And where does it go then when you put it in your blue bag?

VOICE 1: To be honest I don't know. For me it goes down to the trash room into the bins.

VOICE 2: Separate bags I use for cans, plastic. I usually have a separate bag that I use for cardboard. I break it down so that they can fit it in. If it rains it doesn't get wet because they don't take soggy cardboard.

MARY-CATHERINE MCINTOSH: So then what happens? When you tie your separate bags into the separate places. So then what happens to your recycling?

VOICE 2: I put it to the curb on the days that they're supposed to go out. And then to be honest with you, I do not know. I just assume there's a plant somewhere that kind of separate things. Again, I just figured there's a factory somewhere. Maybe there's a conveyor belt and they just kind of toss this and toss that.

CC: While many of us have no clue where all of our recycling ultimately ends up. My next guest certainly does. Adam Minter has spent his career examining the scrap business. He's a Bloomberg columnist and the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. He's in Kuala Lumpur. Hello.

ADAM MINTER: Hello.

CC: Now, first of all I want to ask you about that tape we just heard. People dutifully sorting their recycling. They don't seem to have a very clear idea of what happens next though. Are you surprised by that?

ADAM MINTER: No. Most home recycling is really sort of wish cycling and that's a term that occurs often within the recycling industry. The idea being that, I'm going to put this in this blue bin and something good, something environmental is going to happen to it - there's some green fairy somewhere that will magically transform it into a sustainable product. And whether consciously or unconsciously, I think most people don't necessarily even want to know what's going to happen with their trash. They just want to have faith that the right thing is done with it.

CC: Why do you think we're a bit oblivious about it that there's this mystery around it?

ADAM MINTER: If you talk to enough people as you clearly have, it's amazing to me how many people get sort of flustered just by having to figure out where to sort their paper from their plastic. And that's enough. There's a lot of people who don't like doing this. And it's tough getting them past that stage and most people don't spend a whole lot of time wondering about what happens to the garbage that they put in their garbage pails either. It's sort of out of sight, out of mind. I tend to think of it as sort of the junk equivalent of the slaughterhouse. I mean people who eat meat quite often don't want to know how that meat is made, if you will. It's the same kind of thing. People just don't want to know what happens to the other end of their consumption.

CC: Well, it turns out that China takes a lot of our waste.

ADAM MINTER: Yes, well there's one big reason. China is the world's largest manufacturer and manufacturers require raw materials and recycled raw materials are cheaper and easier to obtain than virgin materials. And if you're a giant manufacturer, you are going to want to get the easiest to obtain and cheapest raw materials. So that above all else is the reason that China has been the world's largest recycler - going on a couple decades now.

CC: Okay. So I want you to unshroud a little bit of the mystery for us. If we were standing on a port in China watching all this recycling material coming in, what will we see? What does that look like?

ADAM MINTER: Sure. Well let's go to a place called Ningbo. Depending on traffic is about a three hour drive south of Shanghai. There are specific shipping container yards within the port of Ningbo which is one of the world's largest ports. And if you go into one of those container yards you will see, literally, 40 foot containers being unloaded and they will be opened up by inspectors, who will go in and look what's in there. And they may see giant bales of plastic because a lot of plastic goes into Ningbo. And they'll make sure that there's nothing [unintelligible] in there by [unintelligible]. You hear this term contamination, it sounds like people are spraying typhoid on these on these bales. That's not quite what it is. What they would be looking for, say if somebody orders a bale of plastic that is plastic, that there isn't paper mixed in with it. The inspectors will go from there and then they may go to another container and it has bales of copper wire, insulated copper wire. And they'll go through there and make sure that the shipping documents match up with what's actually in there. And once the inspection is done somebody will come and pick up those those containers one by one - container trucks like you'll see at any port in Canada. You'll see these in Vancouver. And they'll drive them off to the plants where they will then be broken apart and transformed into new raw materials.

CC: Except now China is pushing back, right? Putting this ban in place. Was that a surprise?

ADAM MINTER: Not at all. In fact, there have been rumours that this was coming dating back to the late 2000s. And we started seeing the first inklings of such a crackdown. In 2012 there was a action called Green Fence, which is a wonderfully evocative term. And the idea was again that they didn't want this contaminated material coming in. Meaning, it was in part an action to protect Chinese importers. There was the feeling that many of these importers were being treated unfairly by exporters in places like North America, Europe and Japan. They would be ordering one thing and they would be getting some of it, but they'd be getting also something else. They might be getting lower grades of paper, lower grades of plastic than what they ordered. So they were being treated unfairly. These were bad business deals. So to a certain extent it was protect them. And then there was another side of this, where there was concern that there was too much of electronic waste coming in, too many used products that could go on the market into a secondhand market rather than be recycled. And China's a big manufacturer of new devices, isn't very fond of scenes second hand material come into the country - used computers for example. There was also an enforcement action against that. So it was all part of sort of a big bundle, a big bale if you will, that led up to these actions this year.

CC: Little recycling humour there - a big bale. But let's talk about the implications of all this. You say it's not a surprise, but it's a pretty big deal, is it not?

ADAM MINTER: It's a massive deal. And it's going to be disruptive both within and outside of China. You've already heard what this is doing to municipal recycling programs in Canada. And it's not just Canada that's having these problems - North America, Japan, Australia. I just spoke to somebody the other day in New Zealand and they're panicking because they don't know where to send their scrap plastics and paper of certain grades that are now going to be difficult to get in. This means that municipal recycling programs around the world, at least in developed countries, are facing serious financial consequences because for many years especially in the 2000s these were profitable programs. They made money for the municipalities. And everybody thought the good times were going to keep going on. They built these programs bigger and bigger on the assumption that the Chinese economy would continue to boom and it would continue to want to buy their recyclables. And now that the party's over these various programs have to figure out where to send this recycling and how to replace these revenues. On the China side of things, they need to replace these raw materials. And that's going to be both expensive and environmentally disruptive. Recycled materials tend to be cheaper than virgin materials. It tends to be cheaper to recycle a bunch of newspaper than it is to cut down trees, run them through the paper mill and create newsprint. So that's going to make China economically less competitive. And the second thing that's going to do, is it's going to be a knock against the environment, which is ironic. But again depending upon the material, for example some virgin plastics require as much as 87 percent more energy than recycled ones. Virgin paper uses 68 percent more energy than recycled paper. The irony of this action which is supposed to protect China's environment, is actually going to increase energy demands and is going to increase greenhouse gas emissions within and outside of China.

CC: Is it realistic to wonder why countries like Canada can't just adapt now and start recycling some of this stuff ourselves? Is that an option?

ADAM MINTER: Yes and No. The question is going to be who is going to manufacture and who's going to use these raw materials. And right now roughly one third of the recycling generated in North America is exported out. The biggest reason it's exported out is that there is just not enough manufacturing, not enough factories making stuff in North America to use all of that. Now there is no reason that Canada couldn't say, "Okay, we can't recycle these lower grades of paper and plastic right now. But we could build the plants to do it and then we could export those recycled raw materials to China. And if they're all cleaned up and it's just basically raw plastic, there's no problem."

CC: We heard a few moments ago David Biderman from the Solid Waste Association of North America saying that they're trying to ask China, "Hey guys could you give us a bit more time? Could you maybe sort of change the standards?" Do you think that there's any prospect that China is going to listen?

ADAM MINTER: China is not going to listen to the foreign recycling community. And it's just not going to happen. And you have to understand just how politically sensitive this is in China. Even though China has been importing this material for many, many years. The symbolic value within China, the idea that the West and Japan would be sending their waste to China - it's very symbolic and it really echoes all kinds of sort of what the Chinese view as historical humiliation. For the Western recycling agencies to be coming to China and saying please continue take it our so-called contaminated garbage. It's just not something that the Chinese government is, at this point, going to find palatable. Especially, since it's already come down and said we're not taking this anymore.

CC: Okay, you've got global powers, big financial concerns. But I'm wondering for the Canadian in their kitchen loading up their blue box right now, who might find this all very concerning. Is there anything the individual recycler can do?

ADAM MINTER: The hard news is, there really isn't. That individual recycler is probably going to be asked to pay more for their recycling down the line. But ultimately this is something that's happening sort of a stage above the individual recycler. Just simply stop consuming so much stuff and stop thinking of your recycling as sort of a virtue. I always say, recycling is a great thing to do, but ultimately it's it's just a little better than throwing stuff in the trash. It still requires energy. It still requires space. It still requires factories. If you really want to make a difference to these issues, it's really a question of reducing one's own consumption.

CC: Adam Minter, thank you very much.

ADAM MINTER: Thank you.

CC: Adam Minter is a Bloomberg columnist and the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. He's in Kuala Lumpur. We asked the Chinese embassy in Ottawa to comment on their country's policy of no longer importing recyclables as of January 1st, but we haven't heard back.

[Music: Theme]

CC: The CBC News is next. Then, after Barack Obama's own family... it was his official photographer, Pete Souza, who spent the most time with the former U.S. president, becoming almost like his shadow.

SOUNDCLIP

PETE SOUZA: I could take these intimate pictures of him. It was as if I wasn't even in that room. I mean, he was so comfortable with my presence and the presence of my camera.

CC: Pete Souza gives us an intimate portrait of Barack Obama in our next half hour. I'm Catherine Cullen sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Adam Goddard]

Obama's White House photographer Pete Souza on what a president looks like

Guest: Pete Souza

CC: Hello, I'm Catherine Cullen in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

CC: Still to come, she is a scientist turned bestselling novelist using her prose to get us to pay attention to climate change. In half an hour, Barbara Kingsolver talks about her latest book Flight Behaviour. But first, the man who chronicled the life and times of the 44th president of the United States, with his camera.

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news, I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and 10 years old.

CC: It was a horrific day in American history. On December 14th, 2012 a young man entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and gunned down 20 children and six adults. That day the world saw and heard the public grief of President Barack Obama. But it was one man's job to capture the private sadness for the history books. Pete Souza was the chief official White House photographer during the Obama years. He has compiled many of his photographs in a new book called Obama: An Intimate Portrait. And Pete Souza joins me from Arlington, Virginia. Hello.

PETE SOUZA: Hi Catherine. Thanks for having me on.

CC: Yes, thank you for being here. That day that we just heard about, Barack Obama called it the worst day of his presidency - the shooting. Give me an idea of what was happening when President Obama found out about the shooting.

PETE SOUZA: Well I think you first have to set the scene. He had just gotten re-elected to a second term just a matter of weeks before. So there were still that afterglow throughout the White House that he was going to have this second term to get more things done. It was also Christmas time at the White House. And the White House during Christmas time is just magical - decorations everywhere. There's parties at night. So that was the mood early that morning until word started coming in over the cable television that there had been a shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. And as John Brennan, his Homeland Security adviser, finally came in to give him the terrible news once he had gathered all of the facts - to tell him that 20 first grade kids had gotten shot and killed, along with six adults. I just saw his body language - everything just drained out of him. And he was thinking of it as a parent, probably more so than as president. And listening to those remarks which I hadn't really heard since that terrible day. It sort of brings back all of those emotions.

CC: You talk about that moment where John Brennan actually tells him the news and you have a photograph in your book of that. You can see Barack Obama's arms crossed, his head bowed. You have more photos as well of him hugging his family, hugging some of the families affected, and trying to deal with the weight of this. And I wonder if you can you can talk to me about how the president saw his role during this moment of incredible sadness.

PETE SOUZA: This one particularly hit hard because of the 20 kids involved. You refer to the picture later that afternoon when he first saw Malia when she had gotten home from school, and he hugged her and he just wouldn't let her go. And my guess is that there were parents all across the country that were doing the exact same thing when their children came home from school - hugging their kids and just being thankful that they were able to hug their kids that day. You make it clear in the book that over the course of the eight years, you two formed a real bond. He talks about you as a friend. But I want to go back to the beginning. Tell me about the first pictures you ever took of Barack Obama.

PETE SOUZA: Yes, the first pictures I took of him were - I think it was January 4th, 2005. His first day in the United States Senate. I was working for The Chicago Tribune. I was based in their Washington D.C. bureau. And Barack Obama had just been elected to the Senate. So we decided to kind of follow him his first year in the Senate and the first day I met him was the day that he was sworn in. His family had come to town. They stayed in Chicago. They lived in Chicago. And he would come to Washington when the Senate was in session usually Tuesday through Thursday. I got to know him that first year. And that first day, the thing that struck me more than anything, was that I could take these intimate pictures of him and it was as if I wasn't even in the room. He was so comfortable with my presence and the presence of my camera that it really sort of surprised me. As a as a photojournalist, that's what you hope for in a subject. Someone who - while you're photographing them, they're just going about their business.

CC: 2009, you get this call asking you if you want to be the chief photographer. What went through your mind when you got that call?

PETE SOUZA: I think it was exactly four years to the day after I met him. I think it was January 4th 2009. Robert Gibbs who was not only going to be the incoming press secretary, but really it was more than that. He was one of the president-elect's closest advisers. And I knew Robert. I knew I was in the running for this job, so it wasn't like a total surprise. But Robert called me, it was a Sunday night. I was teaching photojournalism at Ohio University. At the time, I had left the Tribune. Robert called me and he said the president elect wants you to become his chief official White House photographer. I said to Robert, "Well, listen. I need to have access to everything. And if I'm going to document his presidency for history, I need to have an open access card." And Robert was like, "That's not a problem. The president elect gets it." And that was basically our conversation. And then that started what was to become an eight year ride.

CC: It's interesting that you say your job - you want it to be unobtrusive, you're not a participant. At the same time, he calls you a friend, a confidant, and a brother. So where is that line? Because emotionally you're part of the picture.

PETE SOUZA: Right. But when he's dealing with the financial crisis - if a meeting breaks up and I find myself alone in the Oval Office with him, I'm not saying, "Hey, maybe you should try this.

CC: Did you ever want to? Were there ever moments where you saw something unfolding and you felt that you had something to contribute.

PETE SOUZA: No [Laughs]. No. I knew my place. I knew my place. I might put my hand on his shoulder on a really difficult day. You know Newtown or something like that, and just say, "Hey doing okay." Something along those lines. But no, I would never interject my opinion on any policy. I do stay away from those kind of conversations.

CC: How would you describe your relationship with him?

PETE SOUZA: Yes, I'd say that I am a professional friend. I'm not the kind of friend that is going to get invited over to the house for dinner. But I am the kind of friend that we can talk about basketball or how's his family doing. He often asks me how my wife is doing. Things like that.

CC: What's your sense of where his head is at right now given the state of things in the United States?

PETE SOUZA: Well, I've known him now - going on I guess 13 years almost - and even since that first day that I met him until today, the core character of the man hasn't changed a bit. I do notice that he seems much more at ease and relaxed now than when he was president. I think it's a tough job, obviously. And I think in many ways the weight of the world is finally off his shoulders. I'm sure he's hurting inside with what's going on now, but he does not talk about it with me and he doesn't show it visibly.

CC: You talk about the weight of the world being on his shoulders. And that makes me want to talk about arguably the most famous photo you have taken of Barack Obama in the Situation Room. That is the moment of the night of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. An incredible moment in U.S. history. Talk to me about when you realized something was something was afoot, something was going to happen. Probably about a week before. Someone from John Brennan's office alerted me that I needed to be around the following weekend. And they said we're not sure if it's Saturday or Sunday. And as soon as that was said, I knew it would be a special ops mission because oftentimes weather plays a part and when they launch a special mission like that. So I knew it was some sort of special operation. I had no idea exactly what it was. I had some guesses. And then finally, it turned out to be on a Sunday afternoon. And around 1:00 o'clock that afternoon - this is about three hours before the raid - the president came to the Situation Room for a meeting just to go over some last minute details. And it was in that meeting that I found out what this was all about. And then three hours later everybody gathered in the small conference room, not in the Situation Room, which normally had his meetings in, but across the hall there was this really tiny conference room where they had the communications link set up. And everybody just jammed into that room. And when I say jammed, I mean jammed. There was not a inch of space to move about. There was space for you though. Well I was one of the first ones in the room. If I've learned anything, it's get yourself situated right away. I think I actually followed the president in and knew that all these people were going to jam in this room and that I better find a good spot to make these pictures.

CC: Talk to me about being in that room as all of this is playing out half a world away. What was that like?

PETE SOUZA: It was tense, anxious... Here you have the most powerful people in our government - President and Vice President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of State for Defence, and so on. All gathered in this room at the same time. And they're not there to have a discussion. They're there to watch as this mission unfolds and be helpless if you will and be able to do anything about what was taking place. I mean they had already made their decision. And now it is up to these guys on the ground. And all they could do is watch. I think that that accounts for the looks on all their faces that all they could do was watch and not affect the outcome in any way themselves. And in the picture the president is not seated at what we would call the head of the table. There's a Brigadier-General who is on a laptop communicating with Admiral McRaven who is in Afghanistan and essentially running the raid. And so the president let him stay at the head of the table and he just pulled up a chair beside him. And the president was dressed in casual clothes, it was a Sunday. I think he had like a windbreaker on. He looks like just one of the many people in that room.

CC: That's where my eye goes immediately when I look at this picture. There's a lot of empty space around him and the intensity of the look on his face.

PETE SOUZA: Yes, it was pretty intense. It was pretty intense in everybody's face. Much has been made of Hillary Clinton having her hand up to her face in that particular moment. But I went through my pictures - while they were in that room for 40 minutes I took one hundred and two pictures. And actually somewhere at home I wrote down the number of times different people had their hand up to their face. And at one time or another everybody did. It's just what you do when you're anxious and nervous. And it just so happened I chose this particular frame of the 102 because everybody had what I thought was the look best expressed the mood and emotion that was taking place.

CC: The photo shows the moments of... I don't want to use the word anticipation, but the waiting. But tell me about what happened in that room after the photo that winds up in this book. After the photo everybody's seen.

PETE SOUZA: As soon as someone, I don't know who it was you heard over the audio, assume it was someone on the ground. But it could have been Admiral McRaven. You heard Geronimo K.I.A. Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden and K.I.A was killed in action. And as the helicopters lifted off, everyone stood up and the president reached across the table shook hands with a few people. There were no big smiles or high fives. There was none of that. There was no celebration. But there was an acknowledgement with the handshake that they had gotten this guy that had wreaked havoc on our country 10 years before with the attacks on New York and D.C. and Pennsylvania, that killed a lot of Americans. It took us 10 years to find him, but we finally found this guy. It was more than seven hours later, I forget the exact time, but it was sometime between 11:00 p.m. and midnight East Coast time when the president finally announced publicly that we had in fact killed bin Laden.

CC: Do you let yourself react at all in those moments, the moment of Geronimo killed in action. Obviously you're a human being. You're having an emotional reaction to it, but is there any time to express that or you've got a job to do?

PETE SOUZA: I have a job to do. I have to be honest with you, I did not know what Geronimo K.I.A meant, when they said. I didn't know. I did not know that Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden. But you know obviously I knew or suspected they had gotten him when the president started shaking hands with other people. So I was just trying to you know react photographically more then emotionally to what was taking place.

CC: There must have been moments though in the eight years maybe only a handful of them but can you recall a moment where the humanity sort of takes over the job you have to do?

PETE SOUZA: We talked about Newtown and I think actually it was two days after Newtown where the emotion took over me. Two days later, we went to Newtown. And so he spoke at a public memorial service. But before he did that, he met with all of the families and we were there for hours meeting with each of the individual families. And I was photographing all of this and I think that's the one time more than any other that I was visibly crying as I was making pictures. Just trying to imagine the horror of these parents. Two days after the worst possible thing that could have happened in their life, especially for the parents of the first graders. You send your six-year-old kid off to school in the morning, you put them on the bus, you kiss them goodbye, and then you never see them again because some crazy guy just shot them. That was the one time where more than any other I was overwhelmed by emotion.

CC: Do you have to be open to that too as a photographer? Do you have to be tracking the emotion of a moment when you're trying to put together a powerful picture?

PETE SOUZA: I do think so. Hopefully you're able to control your emotions though as as things are happening. I think I did a pretty good job of that, except for Newtown. I mean there were other times where maybe I'd get emotional as things were happening, but I wasn't crying. And two days after Newtown I was crying as I was photographing and that makes it difficult to photograph when your eyes become so teary that you can't really focus the camera.

CC: Okay. I want to ask you about the morning after Donald Trump's surprise victory. You're at the White House. You're shooting photos. What was that morning like?

PETE SOUZA: Well there are a lot of disappointed people. And there were a lot of young people who were overcome emotionally. There is there was one gal that worked as the assistant to the president's chief speechwriter and she had become a friend of mine. She was in her 20s. When I came in the morning I checked in with her just to see how she was doing. And she just started crying. She was crying on my shoulder. I'm an older guy. I had been through a lot and I knew our country would get through this. And I was trying to trying to be the adult to her and say, "This is going to be okay. The country is going to survive." And I think the president when he came down from the private residence to the oval office that morning, I think he took the same approach. He was trying to be the adult. I mean what are you going to do, the American people decided to elect this guy president.

CC: People know you as the White House photographer, but you've also gained a lot of scrutiny for what you've been doing with some of those photographs since Donald Trump has come into office. Lots of people have said that you troll the president. I think I've actually heard you in interviews embrace that title - you've been posting pictures. I just want to give people an example. This is a caption: "President Obama being updated in 2010 on the latest terror threat. This picture was taken at night in the Treaty Room - his office in the private residence. The TV was off and he wasn't tweeting nonsense." You put up photos that you say are examples of President Obama showing respect for women. That happened to coincide with moments where there are questions about President Trump's attitude towards and treatment of women. Why are you doing this?

PETE SOUZA: Well, I am now a private citizen. And in our country, a private citizen has the ability to say whatever they want. I choose to respectfully and subtly as I can post photographs that are in the public domain meaning they've been made public before and try to accompany those photographs with with words that provide context. I think the two examples you talked about are probably the two where I've gone a little further than than being too subtle. So those maybe were not as subtle.

CC: Okay. We're going to leave it there. Pete Souza thank you very much for your time.

PETE SOUZA: Thanks for having me on.

CC: Pete Souza it was the official White House photographer during the Obama presidency. His new book is Obama: An Intimate Profile. He spoke with me from Arlington, Virginia.

CC: Coming up Barbara Kingsolver is a biologist who made the leap from science to storytelling and the message behind her books is one we've been talking about this season on The Current... adaptation. Barbara Kingsolver talks about her climate change inspired fiction that may feel a little too close to home, in our next half hour. I'm Catherine Cullen sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Adam Goddard]

'This is not going to end well': Author Barbara Kingsolver on climate change

Guest: Barbara Kingsolver

CC: Hello I'm Catherine Cullen in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Adaptation theme]

VOICE 1: How can our weather turn murderous? A few degrees looked so small on the thermometer. To stabilize the flood and fire storms, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent within a decade. Heaven help us get our minds around that.

CC: For decades, Barbara Kingsolver has been writing about nature, justice, biodiversity, social change, all with gripping plot lines and all through the eyes of unforgettable characters. What better person to talk to you as part of our ongoing project Adaptation because adapting to our social and ecological realities requires more than just facts. It may also require some imagination. Barbara Kingsolver earned multiple university degrees including a doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She has written everything from scientific journal articles, to poetry. And she's written 14 books of fiction and nonfiction. Barbara Kingsolver became a household name in 2000 when Oprah selected her novel The Poisonwood Bible for her book club. Throughout her novels the natural world is more than just a setting, it's another character in this story. Her detailed descriptions of plants and animals evoke a sense of wonder and awe for all of life. Her most recent novel Flight Behavior is considered a climate change parable. She's thought a lot about how to talk about such a daunting phenomenon and what we need to do to adapt to the new reality. Barbara Kingsolver lives in Abingdon, Virginia. Anna Maria spoke with her in September.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: For listeners who are not familiar with Flight Behavior, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of the plot?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: A thumbnail sketch of the plot is that a remarkable event occurs, a natural event occurs in a little town in the Southern Appalachian Mountains which is perceived by a lot of the local people as a sort of wonderful miracle from God. And it attracts a lot of attention national and international attention and it brings in scientists who study this phenomenon and understand that it's really a kind of a harbinger of disaster, because it's it has happened because of climate change. It's a novel about humans and the human capacity to understand what we're seeing in different ways based on what we want to see. So the natural event, I don't really want to give away but it has something to do with the migration of butterflies and a sort of a terrible shift in a migratory pattern. And while this hasn't actually happened, I spent a lot of time while I was writing the book - Of course I did a lot of research and I talked with a lot of scientists who study this phenomenon who were very helpful in advising me as I constructed a scenario that well it hasn't happened. It certainly could happen. And it's the kind of thing we're going to start seeing more and more as natural systems become disrupted by climate patterns that have never before occurred on Earth, you know since the publication of that novel. Well I will say that I have written another novel that will be coming out next year. So I'm still thinking a lot about this. And it's an interesting time to be talking about it because in the United States we've just seen an unparalleled human disaster coming out of two storms that were both unprecedented in magnitude, in one way or another. One of them was a hurricane Irma which hit Florida at a rate of speed - a sustained rate of speed of wind speed that's never before been recorded. And of course just before that, you know days before that hurricane Harvey and you know people are calling it a 500 year flood or this or that. But in fact it's the new normal. We're going to see more and more of this for the simple reason that warmer air holds more water. Warmer oceans stir up bigger storms and it's all going to fall on us. So there you are.

AMT: Well and there's so much to pick up on that. And I'm going to ask more about the hurricanes as well. And your book Flight Behavior, it's many layers it's also about perception. It's about what people see in front of them and how they interpret it.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Yes.

AMT: When it comes to our natural world.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Yes. I really wanted to write a novel about how we talk about climate change how we think about it and why we don't talk about it and why it is so hard for us to think about. And I really also spent a lot of time researching human psychology, reading a lot of literature about how people decide what to believe because this is this is something that's well studied. What we all think is that we look at the evidence and then we make a rational decision. Actually that's not what happens at all. Most of the time for most people what we do is decide what we believe first and then look for information that confirms what we want to believe. And it's you know we can point fingers and talk about other people doing this, but in fact we're all doing pretty much the same thing. We're all selecting our news sources and our information sources and surrounding ourselves with the people who will confirm kind of what we want to know. This makes it really really hard to change our minds or to sort of accept new information, particularly new information we don't want to here because climate change is really really terrible. Let's face it. This is not going to end well. You know it's a wonder we look around and see as us as a society, as nations, as a world. This terrible thing is coming right at us and we are not doing very much to either adapt or to stave it off. And you think why in the world are we behaving like this. The answer is because we're humans. It's analogous to avoiding going to the doctor. You know you feel a lump, or you know you feel a shortness of breath. You feel like something's terrible there but you don't want to go to the doctor because you don't want to hear the bad news. Well we've reached that moment where we've got to go to the doctor. This is not going to end well. Sorry. Sorry to be so direct. But you know we can submit ourselves to the chemo to the difficult procedures. We're going to have to undertake, or we can ignore it and live as we are living for a little longer. But it's not going to end well.

AMT: Well and so I'm interested in what you thought just before Hurricane Irma hit Florida and while Hurricane Harvey was that the very tail end of hurricane Harvey and the damage is being assessed in the water still there. Scott Pruitt the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said it was “insensitive” to talk about climate change when talking about the hurricane. What did you think when you heard that?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: I think he doesn't want to talk about it. He is literally the worst denier in the world right now because he's in the position to do the most about it and he's refusing. I have no sympathy for that man. He should not be in the position. He's being incredibly insensitive by refusing to address this natural and human disaster that's coming at us. And it makes me really angry because the people who are hurt the most by climate change are the people who have the least control, the fewest resources to move, to get themselves out of the way to move you know to higher ground so to speak. And also they are the people - not just in the U.S. but globally - the people who are contributing least to carbon emissions. The poorest people in the world, in India, in the Bay of Bengal, those are the people who are doing the least to contribute to this problem. And those of us who are doing most, who live in the biggest houses, drive the biggest cars, have the biggest carbon footprints are somewhat insulated from the effects of the first, you know the first, the head of this disaster by the resources we can use to shelter ourselves or even out and build dikes giant dams around Manhattan or whatever people are talking about you know putting more resources into protecting our extravagant lifestyle.

AMT: You know it's interesting this is where your fiction meets the real world. You have a scene in flight behavior where the main character is talking to someone who's sort of working to get people to recognize climate change. And he's got a list of the things you need to change in your life.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: And he's from California or someplace. Yes.

AMT: And he as he reads them out to her, she's lives in-

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Southern Appalachia.

AMT: In relative poverty. She doesn't have a lot in it's like fly less, eat less meat.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Right. He is saying like, yep “bring your own silverware to restaurants” and she says “I don't eat in restaurants” and he says “take fewer airline flights” and she says “I've never been on an airplane”. Yes. Even within the nation of the United States, even within developed nations there are also people who are living with poverty and that's certainly true of Texas. The flooding from Hurricane Harvey has left a lot of very poor people in terrible straits.

AMT: Why is it so hard to talk about climate change?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Well there's a whole novel worth of reasons and some of them are obvious. None of us likes to talk about difficult things. We don't like bad news or we don't like - just as I said we don't like to go to the doctor when we're afraid we're going to be told of bad news. But climate change is bigger than this and it's a harder problem to get our minds around partly, because it is abstract. We can't see or hear or most of the time really feel this slight shift in temperature that has such dramatic effects. We only see it you know at its worst when the hurricane hits. Also another problem that nobody's really - few people are talking about with the exception of a handful of people I call profits. One of whom is Canadian, the wonderful Naomi Klein. She wrote a book called This Changes Everything that looks head on at the fact that to address climate change we have to address something much more fundamental which is capitalism. We have to address the fact that the very basis of our economy rests on growth, on infinite expansion, infinite growth. That's our definition of success. And here's where we stand now. I'm not a politician. I'm not a spiritual or moral leader of any kind. I'm just a novelist. I invent scenarios but I'm also trained as a biologist. So I can invent scenarios that are based in reality. And here's a reality. There's something called bio capacity which is the simple measure of the world's productivity. So if you imagine everything that the earth produces in a year and that is the things we grow wheat, corn, chickens, pigs, whatever, also the things that a forest grows the leaves, the biomass, of a forest, the plankton that grows in the ocean the fish and so forth. This is actually a measurable quantity. And biologists and physicists and ecologists can estimate the full bio capacity of the earth. All right what proportion of that do you think we the human species are using, are consuming every year? Just take a guess.

AMT: Go ahead tell me.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: A 125%. So we're using more than the earth produces every year. Meaning okay, we're backing up and we're using biomass that was created in earlier years most notably by through fossil fuels. We're using more than the Earth makes. We're overdrawn by 25% a year and that's growing too.

AMT: And that's called unsustainability, then.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: That's called unsustainability. I'm sorry to laugh but it's so simple. I'm laughing at myself at humanity that we think, we are acting like children. We think we can keep taking more than there is to give. We just can't. And so this system that's just deeply entrenched in our minds. The system that tells us we can only be happy if we have more. It's doomed. It is simply doomed. And so what's the answer? The answer obviously is that we have to learn a new way to think. There are communities that have done this. There are nations that have done this on a limited scale, have looked around and said “okay this is all there is. How do I use what there is and figure out how to be happy with that rather than always wanting more?” But it's not easy to do. I think it will be a generational change of necessity. I think those of us who've lived our whole lives with a certain expectation will have a lot of trouble accepting the idea that less might not be more, but less could be enough.

AMT: How does again we look at Flight Behavior and where you set this in your main character being a woman who is poor and really working hard to raise her family in a place where there's not a lot of opportunity. How does where you live in Southern Appalachia inform how you see the many sides of how people react to the very thing you're talking about?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Is it's very interesting to live in a community and a region that is on average the poorest, most limited economy in the United States. But at the same time people here are bombarded with imagery from in the media. We're surrounded by images of wealth, of extravagance, of people who are living you know very very high consumption lifestyles and seeing how this is glamorized. I think it makes people want more than they have. I think it makes people feel dissatisfied and perhaps even shame. There's a lot of shaming and self-shaming that goes on among poor communities. And it's not just soft shaming. I mean Appalachian people are just bluntly ridiculed in the media in my country. You know people make fun of hillbillies with impunity. And that's another thing that flight behavior is about; divides. The divides between rural and urban populations, divides between science and religion, between educated and uneducated people. There's a lot of sort of contempt, not just disaffection, not just misunderstanding, but overt contempt between these groups. And one of the things I really wanted to look at is how these divides come about and what can be done to bridge them. I've always been a person straddling bridges because as I said I was trained as a scientist but I work in the humanities. I work as a novelist. They're not very many writers of fiction who got degrees in science you know who are trained scientists. And then I left academia because I thought I love this stuff. I love the science, the natural history that I'm writing about in these scientific publications. What I don't love is that only you know when I was working on my dissertation I thought: “They're probably 11 people in the world who will want to read this. I think I'd like to go for a bigger audience than that.”

AMT: You found one. [Laughs]

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: [Laughs] Imagine my surprise. I did. I did. But I'm glad because I mean if there's one thing I can say we need to do it's to talk across these divides. And one thing that I really wanted to say in-flight behavior is that contempt gets us nowhere. You know if we only accept information from people we trust, from people we perceive to be on our side ,then what use is a dialogue that begins with the words “you idiot”. You know if that's where you start, the conversation is over.

AMT: Well talk to me a little bit more about how fiction influences the way or it can influence the way we view the environment?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Well one of the things I love about writing fiction is that it's a way of packaging information that is unthreatening, possibly even a little stealthy. You know because people will read and know. If I wrote a nonfiction treatise about climate change, or about that you know the physics of climate change, or about the psychology of how people perceive and process information and make decisions, the only people who would read that book or those publications are people who already had decided they were interested. Whereas if I can put that same information in a story that's shown to you rather than told to you, through the lives of interesting characters that you start to believe in and you start to kind of accept as your friends, then people might come to that information who weren't really looking for it, but who really enjoyed knowing it. It's just the nature of people to want to hear stories. And I love stories that tell me something I didn't already know. I love stories that take me to places I haven't been or put me inside the brain of a person that I could never be. Fiction creates empathy and empathy opens us to the possibility of new ways of looking at the world. And let me tell you that's what we need now.

AMT: I want to ask you then if as we wrap up a little bit about hope because in 2008 you gave a commencement speech at Duke University. You talked about climate change and about hope. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the source of your hope and what you want people to think about.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Well I can’t tell people what to think about. That's their choice. What I can say is that hope is an option. It's something that I choose and it's a renewable option. If I run out of hope at the end of the day, which I often do, I get up the next morning and I put it on with my shoes. It's something I have to do because I have children, because other people have children, because there are generations coming up who need me to stay engaged. When you give up hope you remove yourself from the equation. I don't feel like I have that choice. I have to keep working toward the vision of a better future that I have in mind. Any other choice I think is institutionalized child abuse.

AMT: And so as we look again at this moment in time so many people recovering from devastating, or were trying to recover from devastating weather events extreme weather events. A conversation that that is connecting the dots to what we're seeing with that misery to climate change. If you could have the conversation change amongst your neighbors end change amongst those people in positions of influence in government capitals, what would you wish you would hear?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Please let us learn from our mistakes and to shoulder the blame. It's interesting to me. It doesn't make me happy but I can't miss the irony of the fact that Texas, a very large state that has given us a very large number of legislators who are climate deniers and who are also adamantly opposed to government subsidy and government assistance of any kind, are now asking me as a tax payer on bended knee to help bail out the state of Texas. I will gladly help the people who need help, but I am also going to be a parent and hand that over with a request that we grow up here and start looking at the cause of this problem.

AMT: Barbara Kingsolver thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: You're welcome.

CC: That was Anna Maria Tremonti in conversation with the acclaimed novelist Barbara Kingsolver. That interview was first broadcast in September. That's our program for today stay tuned to Radio One for Q and join me again tomorrow for what's become an annual tradition here on The Current. The satirists look back at the year that was. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or want to hear again. You can listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or tablet. Hear the day's top stories. Even make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Earlier we heard how nearly every moment of Barack Obama's presidency was captured by his official photographer Pete Souza. But it turns out that there was someone else snapping candids of the former U.S. president too - his youngest daughter Sasha. Our last word today goes to Barack Obama talking to late night host Jimmy Kimmel about the sometimes secret surveillance he found himself under when he least expected it and why he couldn't take his own photos even if he wanted to. I'm Catherine Cullen. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

BARACK OBAMA: Sasha gave me instructions on Snapchat.

JIMMY KIMMEL: Oh really.

BARACK OBAMA: One night at dinner we're sitting there and I had read that snap chat was becoming really popular among her age cohort so I said, "So tell me about Snapchat." So she starts explaining stuff and then you can make faces on your picture and this and then the other. And at the end of it Michelle and I are sitting there, and I said isn't this interesting, and I started talking to Michelle about the implications of social media and what all this means. Come to find out she was recording us the whole time. And then sent it to her friends afterwards. This is my dad lecturing us on the meaning of social media [laughs] And she said you picture yourself sort of looking bored.

JIMMY KIMMEL: As if you don't have enough security problems right now.

BARACK OBAMA: Michelle of course loved it. Malia thought it was a riot. They distributed it to all of their friends. This is what I go through during dinner.

JIMMY KIMMEL: Would you tell young people that they should never write anything in an e-mail that might possibly be controversial?

BARACK OBAMA: It's interesting. I have e-mail. I don't have texting because my phone function is disabled. I now have an iPhone, but it is like the phone you give your two-year-old. Where they can pretend to press things but nothing actually happens. So my phone has no phone, no camera, no music. All it has is the Internet and I can send e-mails. And I think it has a weather box. So I send e-mails. But my rule has been throughout my presidency is that, I assume someday sometime somebody will read this e-mail, so I don't send any e-mail that at some point will be on the front page of the newspapers.

[Music: Adam Goddard]

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December 27, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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