1 The Royal Society of Edinburgh Part of the Oxygen series run by The Royal Commonwealth Society in partnership with

Creative Scotland An Evening with Tim Flannery Tim Flannery in conversation with Scott Donaldson
Wednesday 4 April 2012 Report by Stuart Brown

RSE President, Sir John Arbuthnott, welcomed everyone and introduced the Director of Development at Creative Scotland, Venu Dhupa. Ms Dhupa spoke of the organisations role and projects, and contextualised the evening as part their extensive programme of international partnerships and internships. The learning from a diverse array of fields, she explained, is then fed back into the cultural and creative sector to create churn and open up new perspectives for talent development. Creative Scotlands Scott Donaldson who, it became apparent, is well versed in the writings of Professor Tim Flannery, was then invited to join Flannery on the stage to play a chat show host role in the evenings conversation, with apposite questions to encourage the speakers flow. A question and answer session with the 150-or-so audience members, chaired by Sir John Arbuthnott, followed the conversation and Professor Flannerys responses are incorporated into the account which follows. Donaldson began by introducing Professor Tim Flannery, who was named Australian of the Year in 2007, with some of the many titles he is given: palaeontologist, mammalogist, zoologist, environmentalist, explorer and writer, and asked what set him off on these career paths. It was between the age of six and twelve, Tim Flannery related, growing up outside Melbourne amidst a patchwork of undeveloped bush and farm land in Southern Australia, that he became aware of rapid urban sprawl going unchecked. There was no regard for biodiversity and the young Flannery had strong feelings about the disappearance of parrots and frogs and the environment change. This urbanisation Flannerys mother then characterised to him as progress, something he knew then that he didnt want to be part of. His imagination was also captured whilst diving in nearby Port Phillip Bay. There he found a special place where ten million-year-old sub-sea rocks were home to fossils of creatures from a more ancient bay, including sharks teeth and the metre-long sections of jaw bones of extinct whales. This insight and ability to imagine was a very formative influence, instilling in him a romantic connection between the progress of nature and the evolution of life and left Flannery, at a young age, with a strong sense that the past was a hell of a lot more exciting than the present! By his own reckoning, Flannery was a bad school student and not diligent enough to get in to study science. He trained instead as a high school teacher, studying English and History, which he reflected was very valuable in teaching him to write. A timely minerals boom and lack of geologists in Australia soon enabled him to return to science and undertake a Masters in Earth Sciences and a PhD in Biological Sciences after which, and then with a three-week-old baby, found himself spat out the other end, self-deprecatingly joking: Oh, Ive got a PhD on the evolution of kangaroos, Im sure someone will employ me, not quite!. He felt incredibly lucky only months later to land the one job in Australia he would have killed for, the Curator of Mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney, where he could study mammals, both living and fossil, and travel, thanks to the museums long tradition of going to the Pacific Islands to study.

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His post entailed 15 years of climbing every mountain in New Guinea and finding many new species. Covered in rainforest, this island is exceptionally biodiverse, Flannery related, with more bird and mammal species than Australia, albeit only one tenth of its size. At that time, there were parts of the island which were home to tribes who had never before set eyes on Europeans. It was amazing for Flannery to experience being the first white man to walk into a village, but it was his discovery of new species that was of such significance to his work. Flannery discovered four new species of tree kangaroo which, he explained, fill an ecological position akin to monkeys; a metre-long rat unknown to science; and new bats and many marsupials. This was at a time when there was little or no fossil record of the Ice Age and Flannery and his team documented seven large-to-gigantic, unknown, extinct marsupials, defining the work that was to shape his future career. Scott Donaldson then pointed out that the 19th Century evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace, looms large in many of Flannerys works and quoted Wallace: We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappearedyet it is surely a marvellous fact, and one that has hardly been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalian, not in one place only, but over half the land surface of the globe. Donaldson asked Flannery to offer a picture of what went missing from the Americas, Australasia and Siberia around the time of Mans arrival. The first humans to land in Australia 45,000 years ago did so after making a great ocean crossing from SE Asia in sophisticated open-water craft. Flannery invited us to imagine (as he did with the fossils in Port Phillip Bay), what those who first set foot on a beach in northern Australia would have experienced. Because the coastal flora and marine life would have been similar in SE Asia, they would have thought its just like the place we left, related Flannery, but upon pulling back the dense curtain of foliage just fifty metres inland, they would have opened up a remarkable scene which we can only begin to imagine today by thinking of the Serengeti plain. But instead of lions and elephants, the first people in Australia would have witnessed a host of fantastical-seeming creatures, which Flannery went on to describe. They would have seen herds of Diprododon oplatum, the largest marsupial that ever lived, weighing three tonnes and an unimaginable animal even to Flannery. Kangaroos give birth to offspring only the size of a fingernail, so, he wondered, how could a baby Diprododon oplatum manage to travel across the vast expanse of fur to reach its mothers pouch? This animal had a one-metre skull composed mostly of air, with a brain smaller than a fist. With all that space for sinuses, imagine its terrible sinusitis! quipped Flannery. A light head would have been a useful design feature, he explained, enabling the animal to travel long distances and conserve energy. Kangaroos hop because its the most effective way of getting from A to B devised by any mammal anywhere on Earth. Like being on a pogo stick, the energy from each bounce is stored, essential in a vast land of poor soil quality like Australia, where the kangaroo has to travel great distances for food due to limited vegetation and the scarcity of water. Today there are 70 species of kangaroo; but the first humans would have witnessed 150 different species, including 17 kinds of tree kangaroo and some that were carnivores and others that browsed from shrubs. We know from 45,000 year-old life-size cave paintings that Aboriginal people saw the leopardsized marsupial lion, a relative of the koala turned carnivore. We dont fully know why kangaroos and koalas became carnivorous, Flannery said, but the continent has many herbivores that became flesh eaters.

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Now extinct from Australia, there was Palorchestes azael, the equivalent of the ground sloth in the Americas. No one knows exactly what they looked like, but they were the size of a bull, and had a trunk and very powerful forelimbs that probably tore trees apart. There were giant lizards, including the largest goanna five metres long and half a tonne in weight, the bones of which have been discovered across northern Australia. Forty five thousand years ago, there was also the komodo dragon, which now only lives on a few small islands in Indonesia, the last place on Earth that it survives. It used to live throughout northern Australia and the islands to the north. It survived In Indonesia because the presence of the Hobbit, (a diminutive early human species Homo fbresiensis), pre-adapted the komodo to how dangerous the presence of the bi-pedal carnivore, apes, can be; so when humans arrived, they knew to be afraid. In Australia, there were no Hobbits and the gigantic iguana became extinct. Im one of the few people enthusiastic about re-introducing the Komodo dragon into Australia, laughed Flannery, a development which he thinks would do the ecology good. We know that Scotland would have had mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, bison and giant elk, Flannery reflected, but we are just starting to explore the extent of the biodiversity that was lost when people first came to the Australian Serengeti. Tim Flannery was interested in Scott Donaldsons question of what would have happened as a result of the extinctions and wondered rhetorically what the result would be if we exterminated everything bigger than a Gemsbok antelope on the Serengeti. He believes that massive wild fires (of the sort he has witnessed raging across a million hectares of bush in Australia) would break out because the grass would keep growing with nothing to graze on it. The result of the charred remains would be a simplification of biodiversity. This would have an impact on climate because transpiration by plants is important in creating rainfall, he continued. The extinction of large mammals is more significant for productivity in some climates than others. Professor Flannery began his explanation of this by boiling down the ecological function of a mammal as being a large vat of microbes that feeds plant matter in one end and produces compost out of the other. In a rich environment which is humid, the microbes are still there, even if you get rid of the animals, he went on, so the cycle of plant material dying, decaying and recycling still occurs. In a dry continent such as Australia or Africa, the microbes don't thrive as well outside a mammal, as fire often beats them to the dead plants, and in cold environments, permafrost sees off the microbes, so that the recycling process of nutrients that keeps ecosystems fertile is stopped. Twenty-five years ago, Flannery wrote a book postulating the contentious hypothesis that modern-day Australias landscape and climate were created by the over hunting of giant animals by aboriginal peoples. A week before his appearance at the RSE, a paper published in the journal Science went some way, Flannery shared, to suggest that his hypothesis is valid, and Flannery thinks it may have become a theory, which, he reflected is a wonderful thing for any scientist. One of the questions that has been bubbling under in Flannerys head for some time is what happened for the aboriginal peoples to move from causing the extinction of the mega fauna 45,000 years ago, to living in such an adaptive way in recent centuries. He believes that, contrary to any view that they are primitive or backward, aboriginal peoples are one of the most specialised in the way they live. An example of this is their rarely initiating all of their own people to create an in-group, which is the norm with societies around the World, but rather initiating people from other geographical aborigine groups with the aim of creating links. This is essential in a country where drought can strike for a decade at a time and when links with other fragile groups is essential in the sharing of scarce resources. Flannery deems this way of being as an incredible achievement that allows aborigines to survive. What, Scott Donaldson probed, is the evidence that it was always humans who did this damage in causing extinctions?

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That has been contentious since the time of Wallace and Darwin, Flannery replied, with claims that laid the blame on humans or climate or other factors. Only in the past 1015 years have dating techniques allowed us to say when the extinctions happened in Australia. Regardless of whether climate in different regions of the planet was warming, cooling or stable at the time that the mega fauna died out, it was when humans arrived that the big animals disappeared. The suggestion that the earliest aboriginal peoples caused this is so controversial, Flannery replied to Donaldsons question, because in recent years Australia has had a legal revolution, with the recognition in Australia of native title rights to land for aboriginal peoples. The courts have ruled that if unbroken since pre-European times to the present day, aboriginal people can make claims on land; but, importantly, a key factor centres around custodianship of the land. When a scientist says that the ancestors of the aborigines who arrived 45,000 years ago caused great environmental damage, it has legal implications. Flannery volunteered that this is a problem and is contentious, particularly given colonial history, but that as a scientist, his duty is to state where he thinks the scientific facts point. Donaldson asked why we should value biodiversity as more than just a nice thing to have, at which Flannery expounded the view that our living planet is and has been from the beginning itself shaped by life, even the continents themselves three billion years ago. The fact that we can breathe the atmosphere and that water is clean is due to the influence of life on rocks and oceans and the drawing down of the Suns energy, which is six times that of the total human energy budget. If we chip away at biodiversity, he cautioned, we tinker detrimentally with the great engine that keeps the planet habitable and so threaten to return Earth to being a planet like Mars or Venus that doesnt support life. Donaldson recalled that in his most recent book Here on Earth, Flannery distinguishes between two opposing views, that of Alfred Russel Wallace and James Lovelock on the one hand and Darwin and Dawkins on the other, and asked him to explain why he believes that it is so important that the Wallacean view is more widely understood. Flannery began by pointing out that there were two founders of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were extremely different people with very different perspectives on the planet. Darwin was the most careful reductionist scientist, whose life was spent understanding the effect of natural selection on all living things, whilst Russel Wallace was interested in what evolution had created. Wallace was not a trained scientist, had not gone to university, left school at a young age and his flashes of genius on the theory of evolution came about through an attack of malaria in Indonesia. When Darwin received Russel Wallaces letter he was astonished, believing that had Wallace had Darwins notebooks, he couldnt have summarised the theory as well. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, setting out the evidence for evolution in detail. A decade later, Herbert Spencer suggested that the book be best summarised by calling it survival of the fittest. Darwins sub-title for the book, The Preservation of Favoured Races led the theory to be hijacked to defend social inequalities and the power of the English nobility, whose imperialist dominance stretched around the globe. Wallace never bought into that and questioned how survival of the fittest could create such a cooperative, natural world. Wallace remained fascinated by evolutions having created every part of a civilisation, such as ordering the three trillion cells that make up the human body. He recognised that there are thousands of species and not just me, Flannery said, offering that even 10% of what he personally calls me is made up of other species: the bugs in his gut, the mites living on his eyebrows, laughing, I do wash, but theyre all there! Russel Wallace was right, stated Flannery, that the survival of the fittest and selfish genes do not accurately describe our world which has been forged by co-operation from the level of our bodies to the planetary entity, Lovelocks Gaia, which self regulates to an extent. Flannery emphasised that it is fundamental to understand that evolution is on our side when it comes to trying to live sustainably. The ability to take a more holistic, Wallacean view, rather than the reductionist one that Flannery believes has prevailed in universities, has become more possible in recent years with technologies that enable us to monitor the planet.

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The conversation then turned to climate change, with Flannery, who is Australias Climate Change Commissioner, stating that the basic message from climate scientists hasnt altered for 20 years. Carbon dioxide lies at the heart of the Earths thermostat and the burning of fossil fuels in the past 200 years has released carbon into the atmosphere, creating warming. This is causing extreme weather events and acidification of the oceans, impacting on food security and biodiversity. The tree kangaroos in New Guinea that Flannery spoke of at the start of the discourse, for example, are unlikely to survive in the next few hundred years as their habitats disappear, he predicted. In Australia, he also fears for the Alpine environments and diversely floristic areas in the south of the continent. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now 30% above what it was two centuries ago, and the rate of emissions is increasing year on year. The message we are getting from the climate scientists, stated Flannery, is that this is the critical decade. If action isnt taken this decade, its going to be extremely difficult for the world to slow the warming trend before we hit the dangerous threshold of two degrees of warming. In fact, Flannery went on to say, its probably just one degree more than the current situation, as the climate change scientists threshold is two degrees above the pre-industrial average (prior to 1800) and we are already a degree above that. The fear of going beyond that is that positive feedback loops will take over, beyond which we cannot reverse the Earths warming. The melting of the Arctic ice is an example of a positive feedback loop. On a bright Summers day, it will reflect away approximately 90% of the energy of the Suns rays, so has a cooling effect; but when the ice melts, the dark ocean beneath is revealed and instead absorbs 90% of the energy rather than reflecting it back into Space, causes warming and brings about a cycle that drives the temperature up. James Lovelock takes a more conservative view about the quantity of CO2 required to take us above the critical level, but Flannery defers to the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which involves most of the Worlds climatological experts. It was in the late 90s when Flannery himself realised that climate change was a major problem and so spent the next five years writing a book, The Weather Makers, to explain this to the general public. It used the same data as the IPCC, but Flannery qualified that, unlike them, he was not hobbled with a review process that had to please different countries and express the situation in the most basic English. He was able to write a more passionate book which became a best seller, published in 26 languages. Professor Flannery happened to arrive in Denmark the week the Danes learned they were to host the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, COP15. Flannery recognised the importance of the event and the Danes were receptive to establishing collaboratively the Copenhagen Climate Council which got the backing of big business. Six months before COP15, Flannerys team convened the World Business Summit on Climate Change, which was the largest-ever meeting of businesses coming together to discuss the subject. Out of COP15, they achieved the Copenhagen Accord. Flannery described himself as having been disappointed on the day he left Copenhagen, but that he is less so now. There is hope, he offered, as things are slowly changing. The Copenhagen Accord allowed countries to pledge voluntary action to deal with climate change and with nations, as individuals dont like to fail on objectives they set for themselves, he postulated. Lord Stern has calculated that if you add up the commitments, they reach about half the emissions reductions we need to avoid dangerous climate change. We are still some way off achieving a global treaty on climate change, Flannery reflected, but the area that gives him the greatest hope, is technology. Solar panels halved in price last year; new technologies are being deployed in the wind sector; and there are novel distribution technologies for electricity generation. It is going to be a close run thing, Flannery said, but there is still hope of avoiding dangerous climate change. The role of the Australian Climate Change Commission is to raise the level of understanding amongst the Australian public of climate science, the economics around it and whats

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happening internationally. In a democracy, Flannery contended, you wont get the longer-term outcomes you need in complex issues unless theres a level of public understanding. So contentious an issue in Australia is it, however, that when the Commission goes out to speak to the public, they need police protection. Flannery says that people need to understand that Australia is the largest exporter of coal globally, and that those with vested interests in fossil fuels can be resistant to change. When I go round regional Australia I meet lots of coal miners. Theyre invariably decent people. They come from an industry with a strong tradition, a very proud tradition, and when they hear people saythe burning of coal is part of the problem, its almost an existential threat in a way; it threatens not just their business, it threatens their self respect and you have to be very carefuldealing with all of that, Flannery said. On top of that there is a crazy fringe and belief that discussion of climate change is an attempt by the UN to set up a global government and deprive people of their liberty and, lamented Flannery, people have even brought guns to climate change events in Australia. If he knew the answer to what scientists could do better to carry people with them, Flannery said, hed be retired and on the beach somewhere! Scientific messages can be complex, such as for climate, the explanation of CO2 in the atmosphere is not simple, whereas the sceptics message is its not happening, or that person is not reliable as a source of information. The northern hemisphere has been collecting weather data since the 18th Century, and with a high density of weather stations, whereas Australia does not have that same history and coverage of meteorological data with which to compare current extreme weather events and so point to the human cause of climate change. The role of culture and media in the arena of climate change Flannery sees as huge, noting that some of the most effective rebuttals of the climate change deniers have been articulated through satire. The biggest concern for him, teaching science and science communication at university, is the reluctance of young people, to get involved in these subjects, and there is little respect for the expert, with the public not wanting to know. One of the things Flannery finds most frustrating is the lack of interdisciplinarity in universities, and he attempts to bring people together more, teaching Arts and Sciences students jointly, where he admits that finding a common language can be problematic. Donaldson then quoted an early Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, John Playfair, who wrote in his book about James Hutton (another Fellow): The mind seemed to go giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time and we became sensible how much further reason may go than imagination can venture to follow. Donaldson asked Flannery whether it is this failure of imagination that prevents us from grasping the geological timescales, the complexities of Earths systems and our dependence on them, and will this ultimately be our downfall? Flannery fears, he confessed, that we are becoming less imaginative. If we understand the abyss of time to which Playfair referred, we can comprehend that this process over time has taken a little bit of the Earths crust consisting of complex pre-life type molecules and created humans, and that every living thing is just animated fragments of the Earths crust. We all share a common origin and have grown interdependent through the evolutionary force that Wallace and Darwin identified. This gives Flannery hope, and he rejects the theory that humans are too selfish and greedy to live sustainably in the world. He believes that every command and control system is selfish, citing the human brain, which weighs only 2% of our body mass, but takes a highly disproportionate 20% of the energy from the food we eat every day and will cut off energy to other organs if under duress before depriving itself. But the one thing the brain can never do is to destroy the body upon which it relies, just as we cannot destroy the planet upon which we depend.

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Flannery claimed that we are in an incredibly privileged position because we are Gaias intelligence, we are Gaias brain. People are important because our intelligence allows us to organise matter at a fundamental planetary level, he believes. We have the opportunity to organise a more sophisticated Gaian system than currently exists a nervous system for the planet. Ultimately that Gaia will reproduce, when we send life to another planet to colonise that planet with life. At the speed we can move through the universe, even today, it would only take five million years for humanity to colonise the entire Galaxyinformation systems will be organising matter at the Galactic level, asserted Flannery. This is a critical point in history, he said and to throw it all away because we cant shift from burning coal to using wind and solar, seems to me ridiculous. Humans are extraordinary, he said, the most important amazing and marvellous thing in the entire universe and certainly the most complex.so lets hope we never let our imagination fail to see our own greatness and power, because if we do that, we will do stupid things.

Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the RSE, nor of its Fellows The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotlands National Academy, is Scottish Charity No. SC000470