Jesse Ausubel on Agriculture, Technology, and the Return of Nature

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2015

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Thousands of bears in New Jersey. Humpback whales near New York City. Acres devoted to farming stable or declining even as food production soars. Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the return of nature. Ausubel shows how technology has reduced many of the dimensions of the human footprint even as population rises and why this trend is likely to continue into the future. The conversation concludes with Ausubel's cautious optimism about the impact of climate change.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:12.0	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast,
0:17.0	and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.0	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006.
0:27.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:34.0	Today is July 29, 2015, and my guest is Jesse Ausebel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment
0:41.0	and Senior Research Associate at the Rockefeller University.
0:45.0	Jesse, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:47.0	Russ, it's a pleasure to be with you and your listeners.
0:50.0	Our topic for today is the interaction between technology and the environment and nature.
0:55.0	We're going to focus on a fascinating essay you published in the Breakthrough Journal,
0:59.0	the title of that essay, The Return of Nature, how technology liberates the environment.
1:04.0	I want to start with the agriculture as you do there.
1:07.0	What has been agriculture's influence on the environment in recent decades, especially when we think about corn,
1:13.0	which is a major agricultural product in the United States?
1:17.0	Russ, when we think of high tech, we tend to think of telecommunications and computers,
1:23.0	but actually innovation in farming and agriculture continues to be very fast.
1:29.0	One of the ways we see that is that yields keep rising in the same way that a semiconductor company
1:38.0	may get more chips out of the same silicon wafer than it used to.
1:42.0	Farmers are getting more corn out of an acre or a hectare of land.
1:47.0	A lot of that is for the same reason.
	...

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