Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today we are bringing you the final Drilling Deep episode of the year, but don't worry, we'll have more for you next year. In this recurring series, Adam Lowenstein talks to the authors of various books that have come out that tackle the climate crisis, democracy, energy transition, techno, utopia, AI, all the things that are sort of feeding into the
poly crisis. Today, I'm obsessed with today's book, Natasha Hakimisa FATA's Another World as Possible Lessons for America from around the globe. I love this book. It brings us nine inspiring case studies from places that completely reject the quote unquote wisdom of the West and have done things differently and had it work out.
Shocker.
A really great example is this idea that, of course everyone knows that it's naive to think that fossil fuels won't be around for decades to come. Of course we're going to need them. Everybody knows this blah blah blah. But more than a decade ago is a Pata tells us when wind and solar were actually way more expensive than they are today. Uruguay, which had been dealing with droughts and energy shortages for a long time, transitioned its
entire economy to almost exclusively renewables. Today, ninety eight percent of its electricity comes from renewable sources. And they did that transition in just two years, and they used the savings to slash the country's poverty rate from forty percent into the single digits. That transformation is just one of the nine stories that's Apata tells in this book. I love ending on this note that the way things are is not the way they have to be. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Forget the Africa you think. You know. This is Radio Workshop, Real stories about young Africans. We help each other. Anything that is pott in you, is potting me, is pott in my neighbor. We come to care that and find a solution. In our latest episode, you'll meet youth from Namzama, South Africa who are taking the electricity crisis into their own hands, the world's youngest population, One story at a time, the Radio Workshop podcast.
The place I wanted to s start is conveniently right at the beginning of the book. In a lot of ways, your family's story embodies the American dream, and yet you write, there are plenty of other countries that offer their citizens not just a better future, but a better present.
I'm the daughter of undocumented immigrants. My mom's from Mexico and my father's from Iran, and I grew up in a household where this idea of the American dream was talked about quite a lot. And I often refer to my brothers in me as these little American dreams that my parents had. But you know, we were the first to get it. I was the first of my family to get a college degree. So in some ways, that American dream did come true.
But in a lot of.
Other ways, it started to feel like that American dream that my parents had was actually more possible in some of the countries that I've had the privilege to.
Live in or to visit.
And a lot of that understanding came from a health incident with my mom. So I write about this in
the introduction to the book. But when I was in grad school, my mom, who hadn't had access to health care, hadn't had health insurance for many years, had undiagnosed, untreated diabetes that was diagnosed when she was being rushed to the emergency room nearly in a diabetic coma and had to have her right foot amputated, And at the time I was flooded with this concern that unfortunately many of us have felt for my loved one, know how is she going to survive? What was her life going to
be like moving forward? But at the same time I had this added dread of how are we going to afford the insulin she was going to need to stay alive, how were we going to afford all of the treatments she needed? And I knew because I had lived in countries like the UK where I live now, that it didn't have to be like this, that we could have universal health care, and that were one of very few wealthy countries in the world to not have a system like that. So that's the personal side of things that
inspired this book. The kind of professional side of things is that I've been a journalist in mostly progressive media in the US for about fifteen years now, and during this time I've been writing and reporting on these issues that feel so intractable in the States. It seems often we take one step forward and two steps back, or many steps back.
In the case of right.
Now, and I was at the same time living in places like in Portugal or the UK again and a number of other countries where it felt like they'd made a lot of progress on some of the same issues, sometimes the point of actually solving or getting very close to solving some of the same problems we have in the US.
So I really wanted to share.
These success stories from very different places. Is I tried to take as global perspective as possible and kind of uplift them in what I would imagine well and what is a kind of continuous battle on the left to get some of these things done.
Before we get into some of the hopeful stories that you tell in the book from places around the world. There was a phrase you used early in the book that struck me because it really felt very real and tangible, especially right now. But certainly it's not like on January twentieth, all of the sudden, America became a really hard place to live for most people. That was true on January
nineteenth just as much. And you write early in the book, whenever I come home to the United States, I'm immediately struck by the palpable despair sense in those around me, and that felt like a very clear articulation of something that a lot of people I think feel and or maybe don't even aren't aware of conscious One of the themes to me, at least in the book was this kind of the weight of precariousness or living in a sense of precariousness that Americans feel, and like you said,
we assume is sort of the only story that can be told. This is sort of just the price of living. But one of the points in the book is that no, it doesn't have to be this way.
That despair that I feel in my communities and my friends and loved ones in the US when I go home or just even walking around, a lot of it stems from this what is actually quite a real threat of looming precariousness, as you put it, where if we talk about healthcare, for example, the sense that you're just one medical bill away from bankruptcy, or that you're actually not going to be able to access that healthcare, or your child isn't going to be able to access that
healthcare if they needed, if they have a disease, or you know, have a terrible accident or something again that adds to this despair in the us are the victim of a violent.
Gun crime or a mass shooting.
And then there are things like my family is in Los Angeles, and it's sort of impossible to go to Los Angeles and not be immediately struck by the homelessness crisis and by the fact that there's seemingly been an active decision to allow an entire population to go unhoused and not sea housing as a basic rate.
So I could, you.
Know, I could list a number of other things that kind of add to this sense that I have when I go home, but those are the two that hit me sort of immediately.
On the fun list of existential threats to humanity. That sense of despair really pervades a lot of discussions about the climate crisis right now.
So I want to.
Talk about Uruguay's renewable energy transition. Can you tell an overview of the story of what happened in Uruguay and their pretty remarkable energy transition.
Yeah, I just want to back up for a second and point out so this book has what I would call kind of crypto crypt policies. You have everything from universal healthcare to paid parensal leave to you know, I end in universal pensions and in between. There are a lot of other policies and places that I take my readers with me too.
But I couldn't really.
Conceive of a book that talked about progressive policies like paid parental leave that didn't also talk about climate change or biodiversity loss. And I mean down to the fact that there is if there is no planet to have children on, what is the use of paid parntal leave, for example? And so I chose only two I you know, if I had more room, I would have chosen many,
many more. But urdu Why was a really fascinating example to me of how a much lower income country could do the sort of unthinkable and actually green their grid in less than two years. And that story, like a lot of the stories in the book, starts with the crisis. So Uruay doesn't have any naturally occurring fossil fuels. It
still hasn't found any despite searching for them. And because of the fact that they have a publicly owned utility that's been around, you know, since the early nineteen hundreds called um which is their their electric utility, the government
was essentially in charge of keeping the lights on. Again because it's a low income country and it depended on hydro drig dams for more than half of its electricity needs, and the rest of it came from imported fossil fuels, usually from Argentina and Brazil.
Neighboring Argentina and Brazil.
Whenever there were severe droughts, and they became more frequent and more severe over the years because of the climate crisis, they really struggled to keep the lights on. They had rolling blackouts and power cuts, and it was incredibly disruptive to every day life, everything from obviously civilian life to businesses. I went to a factory, a textile factory, where the owner told me, you know, we would just whenever there was a blackout, we would just have to stop working.
There was nothing we could do.
And there was a real recognition in the early two thousands that this was a crisis that was affecting everyone and everything and something had to be done to address it. So in two thousand and five you have the first fit damp left wing coalition party winning an election and they're actually back in power now, but this was the first time they were elected, and there were already talks about these key issues that do I had to address.
Just before twenty ten when Pepe Muhika, who unfortunately recently passed away. He was famous for driving or he was called the most humble president in the world and was famous for driving around and like a beat up pastel blue beetle. Right before he comes into office, after he was elected, he decides that his government should set up cross party agreements on a number it's four key issues that needed to be addressed and that needed to have
long term plans in place. So he didn't want to, for example, you know, lose the next election and have all of.
These plans and just go to waste. So one of those key issues was the energy crisis.
Even you know, so this is twenty ten, even before or just about the time that his government starts, the phantam negotiates a cross party agreement with all political parties in oda way in which they essentially agree to yes, continuing to look for fossil fuels because they think this is important, but actually exploring renewable energy on a mass scale.
And this starts a record breaking transition in which not only did electricity remain a public good just to back up the public utility it was until then in charge of everything from generation to distribution to transmission of electricity
in the whole country. They opened up generation to private companies because they just didn't have again, being a low income country, didn't have the funds to actually do it all themselves and set up all of these what would be expensive wind farms and solar farms you're talking about twenty ten, when it was actually more expensive than now.
They put out calls for.
Private companies to come and set up wind farms and solar farms and also biomass throughout the country.
And it's been.
So successful that you now have a country that runs on almost entirely unrenewable energy. It's something between ninety seven to ninety eight percent of energies if electricity generated in otherwise renewable energy. At the same time, that energy conception actually increased because the country went from being a low income country to a middle income country. People were doing things like buying or conditioning units for the first time, and a lot of other electrome domestics that increased the
demand for electricity. Despite this, rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars every time they had a dry year or a drought lasted longer than they expected, they've gone to saving those millions and also selling their excess green energy to neighboring Argentina and Brazil.
This transition emerged from a crisis, and that's one of the patterns that seems to play out across some of the stories throughout this book. Things in some ways had to get really bad before these kind of changes could either build a coalition or the public support or all of the above to move forward. Can you talk about that sense of crisis, because I think obviously in America, lots of people, for good reason, are feeling pretty as we talked about before, pretty despairing and feeling like the
nation is indeed in crisis. I found it very encouraging that so many of these good things, these good policy, whether on climate or other issues, emerged from really a moment of crisis.
That was one of the most hopeful things that even personally came out of the book for me was that I started to realize there was this pattern of crisis, of really dark periods yielding long lasting solutions that actually really improved the fate of the people of a country,
but also of the country itself in many ways. And so you know, if I go back to the National Health Service, the first universal health care system in the world that came out of the literal ashes of World War Two, as Britain was trying to chart a different path forward after the devastation of World War Two. You look at UDAUAI, these rolling blackouts, this inability to keep the lights on in the most literal sense, and that crisis leading to a consensus across the political spectrum that's
something quite different needed to be done. I looked at Portugal, country that I've lived in and hold quite dear to my heart, dealing with a dual epidemic of overdose deaths and opioid use and rising HIV AIDS rates, and having everyone in the country know someone essentially or have someone in their own family that had some sort of problematic addiction.
As they called it, was something like one in every hundred Portuguese people, and again creating this consensus that something different had to be done, that something something that hadn't been tried before, needed to be tried in this moment because whatever they were doing just wasn't working.
And I think about that a lot.
In the US, as you said, it's not like all of our problems started with this second Drump administration or even the front first Drump administration. There have been a lot of people who have been suffering for a very long time under our current systems, and in fact, I would argue that Trump is very much a symptom of this broad discontent that we're seeing. And more than discontent, a lot of people feel that they can't really survive in the country as it is for a number of
different reasons. And I think it was Alexander Cozikcortez who recently said, maybe this is the end of the broken way. Maybe things are going to be so blatantly broken, And I really wish this wasn't the case. I obviously wish we could come to better solutions without everything falling apart.
But here we are.
But here we are. And I think that the key here is that, as devastating as it is to see all of these things being broken, we can't just give up when we see this. We actually have to recognize, Hey, maybe some of these things were worth saving, and let's think about what kind of society we wanted to walk chart moving forward. What kind of systems will work for the majority, for the many, not the few.
Do you think Uruguay's transition could have happened the way it did if they did have more of an entrenched fossil fuel industry. And obviously this is pure speculation, but I'm just curious from you know, having spent as much time there as you did, and obviously you know, witnessing other countries like the United States, where there is this in a lot of ways, I would say the most
powerful industry in the history of humanity. That seemed like one of the blessings in some ways of uruguay situation was they didn't have that to the same extent, at.
Least I think it would have been a lot harder. You have the example of Argentina that's right next door.
That has a lot of oil reserves and has not been as interested any full green transition.
That's the case in a lot of countries, And you're right that it was sort of luck, but in many ways it had been a curse throughout the past century.
Not having fossil fuels really held wy back. But I think that something that I'm on Mendez, who is a physicist who helped lead the transition from the Department of Energy within the philadempial government, said to me is really important we're going to get to a point in which he thinks there are economies that have transitioned in their economies that haven't, and those that have not transitioned are going to suffer economic consequences that they're already we're starting
to see the impact of right, Like just about the economic side of things, there was a twenty twenty two Oxford University study that said that the world could save twelve trillion dollars by twenty fifty if we ditched fossil fuels. There are very clear financial incentives to transition to clean energy. The other side of things is that we can't afford not to. Right, as you were saying, we're facing an existential question here when it comes to the climate crisis.
You know, what kind of planet is going to be left in the coming years to fight over these profits for? You know, I think that it's true that the fossil fuel industry is incredibly powerful, but I'm also hopeful that the mood music is there and that more and more people are recognizing there just is no actual future without a just green transition.
One of the things I thought that was really interesting about Uruguay's story was something you mentioned toward the end of that chapter, which is that climate change was not the focus of this effort, of this campaign, It was really an economic one, and that seemed to underscore what you were just saying about, you know, purely from an economic rather than an existential perspective, And I found that kind of a really interesting, particularly for us on the left.
We talk about climate in the way that you and I have been for good reason, because it is an existential threat to all of humanity in the planet, but also there is a sense in some ways that we don't want to make the economic argument because it's it almost feels like conceding the terms of the debate to
a more neoliberal perspective. Can you talk a little bit about the I guess, the messaging, the public outreach, the way that this was framed to the people of Uruguay as an economic issue rather than a climate change issue.
As you mentioned, I went through so many interviews with everyone from policymakers to electrical engineers, to people running the wind farms, to just people on the streets, and very few times, if any what they mentioned climate change unless I brought it up. It just wasn't really the driving force behind this green energy transition, which feels counterintuitive to those of us on the left in the US, as you said, who see this primarily as a question of
fighting this existential threat. But what do I did something really fascinating in that, so, first of all, in a very real material way, everyone into what do I could feel this crisis right, They couldn't keep the lights on, they had rolling blackouts, and so it was a question of, hey, we want to keep the lights on, here's what we're going to do. Then it was framed as something that would bring a ton of investment into a relatively small,
low income country. I found it fascinating that the calls for renewable energy projects for wind farms and solo farms before two thousand and eight essentially went unanswered. They were trying to explore this before, and the main wind turbine manufacturers were too busy with larger economies to really care what I Was doing or what they wanted to do.
And it was actually the two thousand and eight financial crisis that created an opportunity for Uruguay because a lot of larger, wealthier countries like Germany and Spain, and I'm sure projects in the US as well were put on hold because of this banking crisis, and those same manufacturers that weren't really interested in Uguay at the time a pre two thousand and eight called Uruguay Up and well the government like, hey, do you still need these? We actually have you know, we have the time to do
this now. So again it was this question of the financial conditions for something like this to happen. Then there was the question of electricity prices, which I point out in the book are actually still relatively high for the region, despite the fact that there have been these massive savings by transitioning to renewable energy, and that again that threat of it was a threat of a two point five billion dollar bill that loomed in dry years has been slashed to less than seven hundred million.
Dollars a year on average. To keep the lights on.
The government made a decision that was very controversial, which was to take those savings and actually fund anti poverty measures. And in many ways, again this really paid off because even though people weren't necessarily feeling the economic benefits of a green transition, you know, in their electricity bills, they did feel it in a lot of other ways. Under Phanathempio from two thousand and five to twenty nineteen, poverty
was reduced from forty percent to under nine percent. That isn't increasi This wasn't just clean energy, but certainly being able to stabilize your energy supply had a huge impact on how the country was run. I understand the reluctance on the left to talk about green policies as purely economic policies. And yet if we do not make this argument and we see that space, we are missing a huge opportunity to point out that actually people will benefit economically from my green transition.
A couple of the folks you interviewed described the renewable energy transition and energy policy in general as a tool for social justice, as a tool for wealth redistribution. It reminded me of some of the foundational principles of the Green New Deal. This is not just a climate thing, This is not just an energy thing. This is really reshaping society in the way that, as you just said, going from forty percent to nine percent of folks living below the poverty rate is quite remarkable.
Yeah, and it's something that again I think on the left we could talk a lot more about, because obviously sacrifices are going to have to be made on some level for some of these policies to be implemented. But this is actually a place where we can highlight how much better lives are going.
To be, just down to the air we're going.
To breathe, because you know, you're rather than having a fossil fuel generator in your neighborhood, you're going to have a solar farm, which doesn't have that impact on air pollution, an air quality, which again has all of these knock on effects in society. And so I personally don't see the downside.
And talking about this, one of the themes or one of the lessons that you outline at the end of the book is the importance of public ownership. I was thinking about it in the context of the energy transition. More broadly, there is a fossil fuel industry. That fossil fuel industry is deeply motivated by short term profits. That's not exactly breaking news. And there's sort of two different aspects to the public ownership the nationalization debate. There is
what do you do with these legacy industries? How do you get them to change if they will not do so economically or willingly or politically, and then what do you replace them with? And it seemed like one of the lessons from the book was the public control the nationalization on both ends of that spectrum, you know, controlling what already exists and maintaining you know, a public role in what comes next.
Definitely, I'm a big believer in public ownership. I have seen how it allows critical infrastructure to be built for everyone and not just for those who can.
Pay for it.
Public ownership is really the only way that we can ensure that that's the case. And you know, I looked at universal public schools in Finland, universal healthcare system in the uk Urduwai's grid which is publicly owned, and a number of other places, and to me, all of these stories and more really highlight how important it is for these things to belong to us, for people to feel like they have ownership over these So it's not just the way that things are run, but the reality is that,
you know, corporations, private companies answer to their shareholders if that, whereas in a democracy which we still live in, holding non tight yes, I mean, the government and these publicly owned utilities, for example, have to answer to the citizens and I feel that, especially in the UK with the National Health Service, there has been a history in the past few decades of underfunding and stealth privatization. It's still great in many ways, but once even greater universal healthcare system.
But I'm really hopeful that the National Health Service will continue to exist and thrive, and hopefully some of the damage that's been done will be reversed. Because most Britons, I am reluctant to say all, but I do. It's widely beloved, feel that this belongs to them. You know, they know that the National Health Service belongs to them, and when they complain about it, I say good because that's how things get better. But it belongs to them so.
They can fight for it to get better. There are no shortage.
Of unions and activists and other civil society groups that are constantly fighting for a better NHS when it comes to.
The public utility with it.
In nod way, what I found really interesting was what you pointed out that someone said to me was that it is a matter that that energy distribution can be redistributive,
it can be a matter of social justice. I don't see how you would do that if you hand over everything to the private sector because they're interested in profit, whereas hopefully you have government and publicly owned utilities that are interested in the public good, and so you had people like it I'm on min this who I mentioned earlier, ensuring that all of the contracts that were set up with private generators, private wind farms, and solar farms made
it so that, as he describes it, electricity remained a de facto public good in uru way, because those private generators could only sell that electricity back to the public utility or and use some of it themselves.
So these are the.
Kind of things that can't really happen if you don't have public ownership. Another thing that Gonzada Cassadavia, who was the head of the public utility, told me was that you as a country, as a community, need to come together to decide what's best for your local needs. And he talked about how different that energy transition might have been if you had a bunch of multinational companies coming in and saying, well, we'll profit more from putting a win farm here, But does that make sense in terms
of the broader picture. They were able to again decide all of these things with the public interests at heart rather than with profit on their minds.
There were a few times, well really throughout the book, but in that chapter in particular, where I was just thinking, like, you know, McKinsey would love to get in here. There are so many opportunities for extracting from public resources. It seemed like such an important thing for the country to really kind of extraction proof the entire system by keeping
it in public hands. You know, one of the things you point out throughout the book is an upside of public ownership is that the expertise in these industries and these policies stays within the government, which within public control. Whereas you know, if these consulting firms or whomever come in, they're the ones who have the expertise and not only are shaping the policy, but are really in control of whether, you know, where all the benefits.
Of it go.
Definitely, and it got to the point where as soon as there was some money for some the owned wind
farms and solar farms, they set them up. Because the public utility understood and the people who were leading all of this understood that it was really important to keep that know how, that knowledge within the public utility as well within the government, so that it meant that they could negotiate better with the private sector when they needed to, but also so that they could, you know, run some of this critical infrastructure themselves.
Let's talk about Costa Rica a little bit. I think in some ways reading the chapter about Costa Rica's biodiversity law reminded me a lot more of the US policy making us because whereas Uruguay's came out of a moment of crisis and it was a radical transformation in just a couple of years, the way you described Costa Rica's process was much more convoluted, much longer, a lot more entrenched interests saying we like things the way they are, a lot of prior supporters getting cold feet and changing
their minds. We won't spend quite as much time on this story as we did on Uruguay, but can you just talk a little bit about that process, because I think it will resonate with people who follow US politics.
So many people within Cosatico started to recognize this devastating crisis that was taking shape in the nineteen eighties nineteen nineties, in which there was severe deforestation. It's something like sixty I can't remember now. Maybe they lost forty percent of their rainforest for things like banana plantations or other for profit endeavors, often run by multinational or American owned companies.
This goesthetic.
For those of you who have been there, you already know this, But it's this incredible place, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, in which it because it's in Central America, it's sort of this corridor between different flora and fauna that come together and create this incredible place. And there was a sense that some people had and this is where the entrenched interest kind of got in the way, as you point out, but there was a sense that these natural resources were the riches that Costa
Rica had that they didn't have. It wasn't a wealthy country, but this was their wealth, the natural environment that they lived in, and it was being decimated right before their eyes.
And the story kind of goes back to the Rio Convention on Biodiversity in which there is in a biologist, an environmental lawyer, and a local policy maker that start to pay attention to what the CBD is saying, right and it's talking about the equitable distribution of the benefits of biodiversity and how key this is to sustainability to actually not just maintaining the bio diversity that's left around the world, but also to reversing some of that damage
that they've been seeing in their own backyard. And so the three of them came together to write a version of the CBD that took into consideration Costa Rica's own political and cultural and environmental context and came up with a biodiversity law in which they were essentially trying to codify those guarantees that especially the benefits of the biodiversity in Costa Rica belonged to Costa Ricans and to future generations and needed to be safeguarded for future generations, which
is actually quite a radical thing. It's unfortunate that it's quite a radical thing to say, but it is true that to say that the natural resources of a nation belong to the people of that nation is something that can upset a lot of you know, entrenched interests as you point out, Yeah.
And to do so in a way that's not describing them in an extractive way of like, these are our resources to be used and burned and consumed.
Right, And so.
These three people coming together, if their names are VI and surlis Patrisa Mardial and Luis Martinez coming together and trying to not trying to writing this great biodiversity law and then trying to pass it starts a more than ten year battle within the Costa Rican government in which you know, there was initially support as you pointed out, and then within Louise Marthinus's.
Political party, then it was retracted.
And then once the biodiversity law did pass in nineteen ninety eight, there was an environmental vice minister that felt that it entrenched on her rights as a vice minister, and.
So then kind of put it on pause.
It became this very long battle in which the biodiversity law slowly gained more and more support amongst different groups within Kostrican society. But importantly those three people and many others and many environmentalists, many activists, academics saw the importance of the biodiversity law and when around even in that time in which it couldn't be implemented, actually spreading the
lessons of the biodiversity law. They had these great kind of picture books even for children, that I've been fortunate to get some copies of that explained what the biodiversity law was.
And then they went.
Around and held you know, workshops with local communities across the country to talk about the biodiversity law and also to get more input into it. And I think that this is one of the keys to that biodiversity law is that it tries to create mechanisms that ensure that locals in every community and in the broader Coastriacan community have a say in how their biodiversity is managed. So this translates into a couple of things. One is the
SNAC is formed, which is the National Park Service. Within SNAC, thanks to the Biodiversity Law, you have regional, local, and national councils that are made up by different communities and different groups that all get a say in how national parks and public lands are being managed. And those groups, you know, include also tribal leaders, which is really key
to a lot of this biodiversity law is shaped. And then you have the Gonachaibio, which is an agency that's dedicated solely to ensuring that the benefits of biodiversity are equitably distributed, which sounds like this kind of grand concept but in many practical ways translates into, for example, ensuring that any policies that are written do not infringe upon
those rights, so any trade agreements. I mean, this was really controversial, and this is they had the Central American equivalent of NAFTA KAFDAM, that contradicted the biodiversity law, and there was a huge battle again speaking of these long political battles over changing a certain part of it so that KAFTA could go into effect and Pastrica could sign
this treaty. In many ways, the Kostriacan example, the Kosturcan Biodiversity Law is sort of an unfinished story in that I think that the key parts of it are so essential for all of us to learn from, especially this idea that you can't really just corden off large swaths of the natural environment and then tell people okay, well, in the case of cost Rica, this is for the tourists to enjoy, and you who are doing subsistence farming
now have to figure something else out. It at least created legal mechanisms in which communities could protest that and find ways to be more involved in the decisions that were being made about their natural environment. But the reality is that it has been a mixed bag in terms of the implementation.
There's still a lot of struggles.
Especially with the recent right wing government that's been in place. Although there are really great important successes to point out, for example that sixty percent of cost Rica's rainforests have been restored, they still have a long way to go towards fully implementing all of the parts of the Biodiversity Law in.
Terms of public support for the policy. More broadly, have these participatory measures worked if people feel bought in.
There has been over the past few decades a real sense of ownership over these natural riches that has spread throughout Costa Rica, and I think a lot of it and many people do point to this, A lot of it has been down to the Biodiversity Law and importantly to those efforts that were made to inform communities, to
bring communities into decision making processes around the country. There is a really great example of how communities can be actively involved in things like national parks on the Caribbean coast and Kawitha, which I read about in the book, where a local community and this was actually right before the Biodiversity Law was written in past but it was
something that essentially applies the Biodiversity Law. Before it's written, there was a local community that decided to come together and actually occupy the local national park in order to retain rights over the decision making in that national park. And to this day they have set up and it's one of the first national parks in the world to do this. They have set up a co management or
a co stewardship model. That means that you have people who live and breathe Gawrita the town making decisions taking care of the national park, protecting that biodiversity not just within the national park, but within the community itself, and ensuring that the benefits are felt by the whole community, not just by a few people.
Who work there.
I wanted to ask you about something that Amy Westerbilt has written about recently for Drilled. It could be interpreted, I think in a really pessimistic way. I found it actually somewhat hopeful. We're encouraging a silver lining of some kind.
I don't know.
I'm curious what you make of it. So she wrote a couple months ago about one potential consequence of the second Trump regime is that on a lot of policy areas, including perhaps most fundamentally, climate change, the rest of the world might just move on with the United States in a way. That is obviously a huge missed opportunity. And you know, we can't fully tackle the climate crisis without
the United States changing how we consume energy. But there are some areas, including climate, where maybe it's just better if everyone else gets on without us. I was wondering about that or thinking about that while reading this book. Because the stories in it are clearly applicable to the United States. We can learn a lot from them. We can see what's possible elsewhere and give us hope and a roadmap and ideas for what we can do at home.
But in another way, I felt like some of these stories were hopeful in the sense that not everyone is addicted to market worship the same way that the United States is. They are also moving on in ways that are different from what we're doing. And I found something
very encouraging about that. And I just wonder what you make of that whole You know, maybe one consequence of the moment we're living in right now is that the world becomes a little bit less America centric, and that might not be a bad thing.
Just to say that I agree with you that the lessons in this book, that the policies and the stories, and I try as much as possible to really tell these stories as stories and introduce you to the characters that I met so that they felt as real to you as they did to me being in the room. With that they are applicable around the world. You know that the subtitle is of the book is Another World as possible lessons for America from around the globe.
It could be really lessons for anywhere.
I've done some talks in the UK and in Portugal, and I've been asked what's applicable here, and I think almost everything is in the UK.
It was interesting, I even said, you know.
Even relearning about how important the National Health Services is worth worth doing. But going back to this idea that it's maybe not such a bad thing for other countries not to look to the US for leadership, or really for the US not to be imposing the American way of life or the American interest. Really, I think I should say on other countries can be positive.
That's a good way to put it.
I really do agree that that's a positive thing, and that actually maybe we'll see and I think that this is the case now more and more in the US that as Americans will see that all along there have been really important lessons in other places that because of
American exceptionalism, we have not been paying attention to. You know, I have friends who work in politics in the States, and they often tell me that if they bring up something that's happening in Portugal or in Norway, there's always this immediately dismissive sort of well, that's there and this is here, and this is obviously something I hear a lot too, and I try to reframe that and say, well, how is it that scrappy uru Way can learn the
importance of a just green transition, and we, the wealthiest country in the history of the planet, seemingly can't with all of these immense resources. Yeah, so I would agree with that, and I like you, and I find that actually hopeful, especially you know, I'm the daughter of immigrants, and I grew up with multiple histories, so the American narrative of the world wasn't the only one that I went out and had under my belt when I was
thinking about the world. And so maybe what we'll see is actually that, yeah, a lot of good could come from this at some point. Obviously, it feels terrible right now to think that with how much devastation. The Trump administration is waking on you know, immigrant communities with these ice raids, and how he's you know, his administration is slashing funding that had already been allocated for things like
solar panels for low and middle income families. How they're trying to open up public lands and including your national parks.
To more drilling and oil exploration. This is all terrifying.
And as you said, there really isn't a significant way forward out of the class in crisis without the US completely changing its energy maya. But I'm also hopeful that at the end of this administration we will get another chance to rebuild, and that in this time more and more and more people will become aware of what was already broken and what needs to be fixed and what kinds of solutions.
Work for more people.
Has anything about your thinking changed over the last six or seven months, anything that you wrote in this book that I get the impression that you finished it maybe before election day, But it doesn't feel like it was written for I don't know a Kamala Harris administration. It feels like it it stands on its own, regardless of where we are.
I appreciate you saying that because writing a book, you know, I write articles as well, and writing a book is such a different endeavor in that at some point you can't update it anymore and it becomes a printed, physical being out in the world, and I can't you go back to the editor and say, hey, can you update this? This moved along very quickly up until the last minute. And as you said, I did write this during the mostly during the Bend administration, but I did start this
whole project during the first Trump administration. I did have hope then, as I do now that we are still able as a collective to change things. And I do feel that both of our main political parties have failed us in so many ways that for me, this wasn't a book that I was writing, like you said, for Kamala Harris administration or for Democrats. You know, I think that there are a lot of people who vote Republican
who probably agree with a lot of these policies. And I reject language like the beast gits of deplorables that Hillary Clinton use that assumes that there are swaths of the electorate that are just not worth listening to or paying attention to. I think that that's a very dangerous,
toxic way to think about our society. Do I wish this current administration wasn't going around lighting fire to the bits of welfare state that we still had left from the Newdale era, to things like I just mentioned, like green energy funding. Obviously I wish that that was the case, right, But I again want to point out that regardless of who's in the White House, we as a collective have a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for,
and that really exciting things are happening even under this administration. So, just to name a couple, I often point to some news that got buried in the general election in November, which was that you had what we would consider deep red states like Missouri, Nebraska, and Alaska not just raising the minimum wage along with a lot of other states, but actually those three states passing paid sick leave on
their state ballots, citizen led initiatives, some with huge majorities. Nebraska, I think it was seventy five percent of the vote. These are what we would consider kind of progressive policies, and yet they're happening in unlikely places because I think, regardless of what you call them, they're actually quite popular.
And that was another lesson that I found from researching this book is that a lot of the benefits of these policies so undeniable once they've been implemented, that they kind of defy politics in that no one really considers paid parentally in Norway a right or left issue anymore.
It's just there might be some squabbling over how long that paid parental leave is, but it's not as it was initially more of a left wing idea or the green transition in order why despite the fact that it was led by the Pantampio, which is a left wing party, most people don't see clean energy as a left wing issue anymore. It's just the kind of a part of their daily lives and they're feeling the benefits of it in a number of ways. And the same goes for
most of the policies in this book. And so what I would argue is that we can find reasons to hope even within the States, even within this dark period that we're in, and continue to fight for what we know will be better. Another example of something that's been happening that I've been excited about is Zohran mom Donnie's Meyrill candidacy in New York. You know, I'm writing now somewhat of a sequel to this current book, which is
going to be about city policies. And I never even imagined in my wildest dreams that someone could run anywhere but in New York City on municipally owned grocery stores. I think that is such a radical idea, and I would love to see how that's implemented. And I hope to one day soon write a book called Another America as Possible, in which I can delve into these amazing solutions that are popping up across the country, regardless again of who is in the White House.
I think that's a lovely place to end it. Thanks so much, Natasha, Thank you so much.
Adam Pood