Full Transcript

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, folks, it’s lucky number 13 here at Let’s Talk About Water, episode 13, that is. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. Can you believe we’ve done 13, well, I think pretty amazing episodes since the start of September? We’ve learned some things along the way and we’re going to keep learning today.

Jay Famiglietti:
For our last episode of season two, we have a very special guest. Jeffrey Sachs is a university professor and director of the center for sustainable development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. Professor Sachs is president of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network and he’s been an advisor to three UN secretary-generals. He currently serves as an advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals, or the SDGs, under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He’s authored numerous best-selling books and his most recent book is The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions, which we’ll talk about today. Dr. Sachs was twice named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders and was ranked by The Economist as one of the top three most influential living economists.

Jay Famiglietti:
He and I met recently at a virtual event hosted here at the University of Saskatchewan. Afterwards, he graciously agreed to join us on the podcast. I’m so glad we’re able to talk to him today. Jeff, thanks so very much for taking the time to join us today.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Jay, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

Jay Famiglietti:
Let’s get right to it. The world is having a seriously tough time right now, global pandemic, a growing wealth gap, climate change. So many things are not going so well. How does the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, fit into this?

Jeffrey Sachs:
The strange thing, Jay, is as you know very well is that some things are going astoundingly well, and that is the expansion of knowledge, the capacity of technologies, the ability to solve problems. So we really have a strange situation where our abilities are seemingly boundless. In fact, look at even COVID-19 with vaccines, several of them developed in less than one year. This is unprecedented in vaccine development history. Often vaccines take 10, 15, 20 years. Sometimes they’re not accomplished at all, but science is so strong that we have several effective vaccines in a short period of time. And yet the human systems, they’re not working well at all. Our governments are not functioning properly. They’re not looking ahead. They’re not understanding the science, either the warnings from science, such as warnings about pandemics and the solutions that can be mustered. So this is the very peculiar fact of our time.

Jeffrey Sachs:
And I very often refer to the expression of one of my gurus, Professor Ed Wilson at Harvard, the great evolutionary biologist who said something witty and very wise, which is that we have entered the 21st century with our stone age emotions, our medieval institutions and our godlike technologies. So here we are the products of the Pleistocene. Now we are an evolved species. Yet at the same time, we have amazing capacities to develop new tools and new solutions. And in the middle of all of that, between our ancient biological heritage and our godlike technologies, we have medieval institutions, we have a US Constitution from 1787. It’s creaking along, I would say, it is not exactly in spectacular shape.

Jay Famiglietti:
So let’s talk a little bit about the SDGs then. Tell us what the Sustainable Developing Goals, or SDGs, are.

Jeffrey Sachs:
The SDGs are the world’s commitments to make a better world. Seventeen agreed goals, agreed by every government in the United Nations, all 193 countries, in September 2015, to bring the world to a better place. With the end of extreme poverty and hunger. With infrastructure for all. And with more climate safety on a path to decarbonization. To do all of that by 2030. They’re bold, they’re important, we’ve got to get on them.

Jay Famiglietti:
So they provide really this governance framework, right? And you actually talk about it in the book, how are we doing? Are we on track? Do you feel like we’re on track to meet the SDGs?

Jeffrey Sachs:
We’re way off track. Let me say why I slog away at them. In fact, more than that, I really admire the SDGs. I like goal-based approaches to our policies and our social aspirations. They apply up to the year 2030. We have goals beyond 2030, such as decarbonizing economies so that we stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, what is regarded as not even safe, but the upper bound that we dare not pass. So this kind of goal setting, I find very important for public policy because it can at least potentially orient us to do the right things.

Jeffrey Sachs:
And I’m very much a child of the ’60s and a child of President Kennedy’s call in May, 1961. So we’re at the 60th anniversary of that, where he said, I believe this country should adopt the goal before this decade is out of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth. And I love that idea that the president said, let’s do something really big, really hard, set a time-bound before the end of the decade – in Kennedy’s time eight years, they were going to complete this moonshot. They did it. So we know what the NASA can do. You know what NASA can do. You’ve been working with NASA for years, satellites to precisely measure the earth. And these are within our capacity.

Jeffrey Sachs:
So the long and the short of it is the SDGs are worthy goals, but, oh try to get the attention of governments to achieve them. We had four years of Trump. I try not to remember that, but it’s hard to forget it. It was the most disastrous misrule in American history, in my opinion. Okay, I can’t really compare with 1858 or with the civil war, but Trump was a disaster, who never mentioned the Sustainable Development Goals and led the country way off track. Then we’ve been hit by COVID-19 by Trump’s failure during 2020, now the hardship of a mass pandemic. So, Jay, we’re way off track, but it doesn’t mean you give up, it means you catch up.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a mixed message there. It’s a little depressing to hear you say we’re way off track but also I really appreciate the inspirational part of it. We have to do this, we can work together to do this. Do you feel like the Biden administration is going to take us in the right direction with respect to the SDGs, certainly with respect to climate change?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Oh my God. What a godsend, especially compared to the nightmare of Trump and how close we came with that insurrection and with a divided country. You think about Trump, again, I don’t like to, but you think about Trump. For four years, he was saying, don’t do anything about climate change, except we’re going to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, we’re going to get out. He spent all his time in that corrupt, nasty administration, trying to promote fossil fuels and trying to do everything possible, it seems, to speed the wreckage of the earth in the name of short-term profits. So Biden is already so much better. He understands climate change. He put us back into the Paris Climate Agreement. He put the US back into the World Health Organization. He put the US back into COVAX, which is the multi-lateral facility to fund immunizations around the world. He’s putting the US back into the UN Human Rights Council. These are huge strides forward.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I still am waiting to hear more about the SDGs from Washington. I don’t know if they really know that the SDGs exists quite frankly in Washington. For four years, never mentioned. I’d go to countries all over the world, SDGs would be at the center. I’d meet with the head of state, “Professor Sachs, we take the SDGs very seriously.” I’ve never heard that in Washington. This is partly a country that is so obsessed with itself that it’s not looking to the rest of the world. That’s part of the problem.

Jay Famiglietti:
I think that became clear to me when I went to graduate school and started interacting with people from all over the world. And you realize that they have a much broader worldview. And here, I was this young guy in graduate school, only thinking about the United States. So I understand. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the SDGs. In my travels, I’ve seen universities actually around the world, actually building maybe master’s degrees and graduate programs, maybe even a little undergraduate work around the SDGs. Have you seen any of that?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Oh, I’ve been trying as much as I can to promote it. When the idea of the SDGs was first announced, that was back in 2012, three years before they were actually negotiated and agreed, I was advisor to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations. And we discussed the idea of mobilizing universities for the SDGs, knowing that they would come in due course. And so we set up the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It now has around a 1,500 member organizations, many in Canada, many in the United States, Mexico, throughout the Americas, all through Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia. It’s a very impressive and fun to see universities taking up this cause with a great deal of excitement and energy because you and I know we have the feeling there’s so much knowledge that can be brought to bear to solve our problems and to address the ways to achieve the SDGs.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Now, they don’t always know it because universities can be inward-looking themselves, more and more they’re outward looking, but they can be inward-looking, we’re going to do our research, we’re going to train, that’s what we’re going to do. But a lot of universities realize we have a regional, a local and a global mission. That’s true for our students, is true for our research, it’s true for the fact that we are a university bringing together knowledge from a lot of different disciplines.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I really like the Greek word for universities, panepistímia, which means all knowledge. So this is a great idea. And I loved directing the Earth Institute at Columbia University because we had, from the law school, we had from teacher’s college, we had from the medical school, from the school of public health, from the engineering school, from different faculties of arts and sciences, from Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, we had wonderful scientists and experts working across so many disciplines with a common purpose, which is let’s figure out how to reduce poverty, let’s figure out how to grow more food more efficiently. Let’s figure out how to decarbonize the energy system.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, we’re doing a podcast called Let’s Talk About Water. So why don’t we do that? Let’s talk a little bit about water. During the Q&A after your talk at the People Around the World Conference here at USask, and we’ll provide a link to that on our website, you and I talked a little bit about water governance and the need for regional governance, say, around large trans-boundary river basins or aquifers and a global body. Is that a model that you’ve seen used successfully in other areas of economic development or other SDGs?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, Jay, as you know, water’s life, as is said. And water is pervasive in the SDGs. It’s featured in SDG Six, of course, which is water for all, including sanitation, sewerage, groundwater, water systems, water management, but it’s part of just about every other SDG also for health, for growing food, for sustainable agriculture, for ecosystem, conservation and stability, for climate change. It’s everywhere. But I was thinking about it. You have one of the toughest policy problems ever.

Jeffrey Sachs:
And the reason is, when I look at your great research, Jay, you’re talking about groundwater, you’re talking about something not seen, not understood, that is in crisis, that is depleting, where the people living above this unseen groundwater depend on the water for their livelihoods, for their food, for their survival, and the water is depleting. Now I deal with a lot of problems in the SDGs, and I can tell you even when the problem is above ground, even when it is smack in your face, when you are cutting down trees, when you have a pandemic, when you have people hungry before your eyes, we are just bad at even handling the things we see, much less of the things we don’t see.

Jeffrey Sachs:
And so the governance of groundwater has to be one of the toughest policy problems and challenges in the world, but you, more than anybody know what an incredible proportion of the world, living on the groundwater, off of the groundwater, I should say, above the groundwater, but not realizing all of the dangers at hand, the depletion, the challenges and so on.

Jay Famiglietti:
So this challenge of trying to manage this invisible resource, thank you for highlighting that.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Isn’t it incredible, Jay, you had to put satellites up of this exquisite sensitivity to understand what’s going on under the ground? That, by the way, is so counter-intuitive that people need really to understand that because the way to figure out what’s under the ground is through a satellite.

Jay Famiglietti:
It’s pretty amazing. And so that satellite that you’re talking about is called GRACE. It stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It’s a NASA mission. And it really functions more like a scale than it does an optical satellite. It’s not like it’s taking pictures or like a telescope. It’s more like a scale. And so it allows us to weigh the regions of the world that are gaining or losing water mass on a monthly basis. And it is completely revealed the global nature of groundwater depletion. And that’s what’s driven my interest in the governance because I’ve been watching this for 20 years and all these aquifers are just one direction, they’re just going down, down, down, down, down, with respect to their depletion.

Jay Famiglietti:
So that’s what’s gotten me into the governance game. And that’s why I asked you about. Pretty obvious that you would need these regional bodies that are focused on a river basin or an aquifer for talking about groundwater and then some kind of global coordination. So we’re trying to work on it, but as you know, as a faculty member, it’s tough to get that kind of funding. You need some kind of foundation or some sort of very open competition, if it’s a federal competition.

Jeffrey Sachs:
We need new kinds of governance for all of these challenges, because political systems don’t address long-term problems, they don’t address science-based solutions, they don’t address regional problems that cross national boundaries or global problems. So the time dimension, the knowledge dimension, the cooperative dimension all fall very far short of what we need. When it comes to water, we have the river basin challenge, that the great rivers, they need regional cooperation. The Mekong with China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so forth, very complicated. The upstream country, in this case, China, often builds dam so without understanding or caring enough about the hydrology of what’s going to happen downstream, same with India and Bangladesh on the Ganges. One could go on and on around the world.

Jeffrey Sachs:
So these are regional problems that reflect a combination of urgency, need, power, who’s upstream? Who’s downstream? Then you have shared groundwater, in which case, sometimes just millions of farmers put their wells down without any restraint, because you pull up what you can. One of my wonderful hydrology colleagues, Upmanu Lall, whom told me the story of visiting an area of groundwater depletion in Northern India. And he went to the local district water commissioner, and he said, “Do you know the water table is falling several meters a year actually?” I think it was, but it was falling very fast. He said, “You’re going to have depletion very soon, it’s very serious. The commissioner says, “I know.” He says, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” He said, “Well, what should we do about it?” There was no plan. It was more or less fatalistic, the water is going to go down, we have no alternative, no plan, but we have a large number of people, millions of people who are depending on the wells, tapping this groundwater. That is the reality that we face.

Jay Famiglietti:
That was our first big paper, by the way. The paper we wrote on Northwestern India using the GRACE mission to identify groundwater depletion from space. That was the first time that I actually realized that I might be working on something important. And that was a paper that came out in 2009. And it was after that that then we started seeing these spots on our maps all over the world. And they were all of the major aquifers. So India is probably in the worst shape, but I mean the Middle East and in particular Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Beijing, of course, California, the High Plains Aquifer in the United States, the Guarani Aquifer in South America, this is happening all over the world.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Precisely because it’s not seen, it is so easy to put out of mind. “Oh yeah, that’s what they say, well, something will come up. We don’t know what.” And in the meantime, this hidden process is so pernicious and so dangerous for the future.

Jay Famiglietti:
In the book, you’ve got a really great quote from Adam Smith about capitalism being mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements. To summarize, Smith is saying that through trade, we’ll see a spread of knowledge that will eventually allow for a balance of power. It’s been over 250 years since Adam Smith wrote those words, do you think we’re getting closer to finding that power balance?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Smith wrote in what you are referring to a most remarkable set of observations. What he is saying is that part of the wealth of nations is a great masterpiece. He says that the discovery of the sea routes to the Americas and to Asia are the two most significant events in the history of mankind. He’s writing in 1776 about events that took place in 1492 and 1498. And it’s a striking observation to say two most important events. And then he explains why. He says, because when Europe connected with the Americas by sea and when Europe connected with Asia by sea for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, actually, since the end of the crossing of the Bering Strait, probably 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, all of humanity was connected. And now there was truly worldwide exchange starting in the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th century.

Jeffrey Sachs:
So he says, even when he was writing two and a half centuries after that, he says these events are so momentous that their consequences still can’t be foreseen. But as a great humanist, he makes a point that he says, by nature, connecting the world should be good for everybody, we can trade with each other, we can exchange. He said, but in practice, it was a disaster for one part of the world, the native inhabitants, because they were basically overawed by the power of the Europeans, by the musket, by the Conquistadores on horseback because the Americans didn’t have horses. They had been driven to extinction 10,000 years earlier. And so what happened when this connection was made, the native inhabitants as Smith calls them, succumbed. It also turns out they succumb to old world pathogens that they hadn’t been exposed to until the Europeans showed up on the Columbian voyages. And so smallpox and other old world diseases ravaged the new world populations.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, the point that your excerpt makes, Smith says what a tragedy that what should have been for the benefit of the whole world only benefited the Europeans in fact, at that time, but he says, over time, there will be the spread of knowledge so that the now forlornand conquered part of the world will rise in force to equate, match the power of the old world. It’s phenomenal. What a vision, by the way. What a humanitarian vision that he looks forward to the shared prosperity rather than gloating in the English superiority. He says, no, no, we need every part of the world to benefit.

Jeffrey Sachs:
What is happening, Jay, right now is Smith’s vision because after all, Asia, which did not have that burst of technological advance that came to Europe or that lagged far behind it, even though Asia had been the technology leader of humanity for so long, Asia fell far behind by the 20th century, much of it was colonized, much of it was conquered, much of it, almost all of it was subordinate to the West, but now, we see that Asia is rising in power, in economy, in technological prowess. And I say, good, that is what we have hoped for throughout history. This should not be a European-led world or a North Atlantic-led world of Europe, the United States and Canada. This should be a true world venture of prosperity and sustainability.

Jeffrey Sachs:
So I like what’s happening in Asia, but I see the panic of the policy planners in Washington who think it’s just the most dangerous and worst thing possible that China is catching up. It’s not the worst thing possible. It is what we want to happen worldwide. We want prosperity to be shared.

Jay Famiglietti:
Jeff, thanks so much for spending some very high quality time with us today on Let’s Talk About Water. We really, really appreciate it.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Great to see you, thanks.

Jay Famiglietti:
Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, a best-selling author, an innovative educator, and a global leader in sustainable development. You can find out more about his recent book, The Ages of Globalization, and about his new Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs at his website, jeffsachs.org, that’s S-A-C-H-S. You can also find Jeff on Twitter at @jeffdsachs, on LinkedIn at Jeffrey Sachs, and on Facebook at jeffrey.sachs.165.

Jay Famiglietti:
Who knows? Maybe this conversation is my gateway to an exciting path as a New York Times bestselling author, maybe a Jeff Sachs Book Club guest? Jay Famiglietti, New York Times bestselling author, that has a pretty nice ring to it, but before I keep dreaming about my elusive book, I have to tell you about all of the other Let’s Talk About Water projects that are actually happening and that you can be a part of while we take a break here on the podcast until season three.

Jay Famiglietti:
We have over 15,000 US dollars up for grabs with our Let’s Talk About Water Film Festival in June 2021. All you have to do is submit a water-related two-minute film to the Let’s Talk About Water Water Film Prize by April 30th. For more information, and to register, just head to letstalkaboutwater.ca, or find the link in the show description. Hopefully, that will keep everyone busy while patiently waiting for season three of our show.

Jay Famiglietti:
Thanks to everyone who helped put this season together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura McFarlan, Amy Hergott, Jesse Witow, Shawn Ahmed, Nikki Manfretti, Stacey Dumanski, Fannie Adepa, Taryn Miranda, Fred Rubin, Aaron Stevens, Zoe Beaulieu Prpick, and our producer, Sean Prpick. Special thanks to our spiritual leader, Linda Lilienfeld, and make sure to those notifications set to hear when we’re back with season three. Don’t worry, we’re still on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many other quality podcasting platforms, so you can go back and listen to all the previous episodes, as I actually just did a couple of weeks ago. You can also stream us on Facebook at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast, or follow us on Twitter at @ltawpodcast. Until next season, my friends, we’ll see you downstream.

Full Transcript

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, folks, it’s lucky number 13 here at Let’s Talk About Water. Episode 13, that is. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. Can you believe we’ve done 13, well, I think pretty amazing episodes since the start of September? We’ve learned some things along the way, and we’re going to keep learning today.

For our last episode of season two, we have a very special guest. Jeffrey Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. Professor Sachs is president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and he’s been an advisor to three UN secretaries general. He currently serves as an advocate for the sustainable development goals or the SDGs under secretary general Antonio Guterres. He’s authored numerous bestselling books. And his most recent book is the Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions, which we’ll talk about today.

Jay Famiglietti:
Dr. Sachs was twice named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders and was ranked by The Economist as one of the top three most influential living economists. He and I met recently at a virtual event hosted here at the University of Saskatchewan, after which he graciously agreed to join us on the podcast. I’m so glad that we’re able to talk to him today. Jeff, thanks so very much for taking the time to join us.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Jay, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

Jay Famiglietti:
Let’s get right to it. The world is having a seriously tough time right now: global pandemic, growing wealth gap, climate change. So many things are not going so well. How do the sustainable development goals, the SDGs, fit into this?

Jeffrey Sachs:
The strange thing, Jay, as you know very well, is that some things are going astoundingly well, and that is the expansion of knowledge, the capacity of technologies, the ability to solve problems. So we really have a strange situation where our abilities are seemingly boundless. In fact, look at even COVID-19 with vaccines, several of them developed in less than one year. This is unprecedented in vaccine development history. Often vaccines take 10, 15, 20, or sometimes they’re not accomplished at all. But science is so strong that we have several effective vaccines in a short period of time.

Jeffrey Sachs:
And yet the human systems, they’re not working well at all. Our governments are not functioning properly. They’re not looking ahead. They’re not understanding the science, either the warnings from science such as warnings about pandemics, and the solutions that can be mustered. So this is a very peculiar fact of our time. I very often refer to the expression of one of my gurus, Professor Ed Wilson at Harvard, the great evolutionary biologist who said something witty and very wise, which is that “we have entered the 21st century with our stone age emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technologies.” So here we are. We are the products of the Pleistocene. We are an evolved species, yet at the same time, we have amazing capacities to develop new tools and new solutions, and in the middle of all of that, between our ancient biological heritage and our godlike technologies, we have medieval institutions. We have a US constitution from 1787. It’s creaking along, I would say. It is not exactly in spectacular shape.

Jay Famiglietti:
So let’s talk a little bit about the SDGs, then. Tell us what the sustainable development goals or the SDGs are.

Jeffrey Sachs:
The SDGs are the world’s commitments to make a better world, 17 agreed goals, agreed by every government in the United Nations, all 193 countries in September, 2015 to bring the world to a better place with the end of extreme poverty and hunger, with infrastructure for all, and with more climate safety on a path to decarbonization to do all of that by 2030. They’re bold. They’re important. We’ve got to get on them.

Jay Famiglietti:
So they provide this governance framework, right? And you actually talk about it in the book. How are we doing? Do you feel like we’re on track to meet the SDGs?

Jeffrey Sachs:
We’re way off track. Let me say why I slog away at them. In fact, more than that, I really admire the SDGs. I like goal-based approaches to our policies and our social aspiration. They apply up to the year 2030. We have goals beyond 2030, such as decarbonizing economies so that we stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius warming, what is regarded is not even safe, but the upper bound that we dare not pass. So this kind of goal setting I find very important for public policy because it can at least potentially orient us to do the right things.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I’m very much a child of the ’60s and a child of President Kennedy’s call in May, 1961. So we’re at the 60th anniversary of that, where he said, “I believe this country should adopt the goal before this decade is out of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” I love that idea that the president said let’s do something really big, really hard, set a time bound before the end of the decade, in Kennedy’s time, eight years they were going to complete this moonshot. They did it. So we know what NASA can do. You know what NASA can do. You’ve been working with NASA for years on satellites to precisely measure the earth. These are within our capacity.

Jeffrey Sachs:
So the long and the short of it is the SDGs are worthy goals, but, oh, try to get the attention of governments to achieve them. We had four years of Trump. I try not to remember that, but it’s hard to forget it. It was the most disastrous misrule in American history in my opinion. I can’t really compare with 1858 or with the Civil War, but Trump was a disaster who never mentioned the sustainable development goals and led the country way off track. Then we’ve been hit by COVID-19, by Trump’s failure during 2020. Now the hardship of a mass pandemic. So Jay, we’re way off track. But it doesn’t mean you give up; it means you catch up.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah. So I mean, there’s a mixed message there. It’s a little depressing to hear you say we’re way off track, but also I really appreciate the inspirational part of it. We have to do this. We can work together to do this. Do you feel like the Biden administration is going to take us in the right direction with respect to the SDG? Certainly with respect to climate change?

Jeffrey Sachs:
My God, what a godsend, especially compared to the nightmare of Trump and how close we came with that insurrection and with a divided country. You think about Trump, again, I don’t like to, but you think about Trump. For four years he was saying, “Don’t do anything about climate change, except we’re going to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. We’re going to get out.” He spent all his time in that corrupt, nasty administration, trying to promote fossil fuels and trying to do everything possible, it seems, to speed the wreckage of the earth in the name of short term profits. So Biden is already so much better. He understands climate change. He put us back into the Paris climate agreement. He put the US back into the World Health Organization. He put the US back into COVAX, which is the multi lateral facility to fund immunizations around the world.

Jeffrey Sachs:
He’s putting the US back into the UN Human Rights Council. These are huge strides forward. I still am waiting to hear more about the SDGs from Washington. I don’t know if they really know that the SDGs exist quite frankly, in Washington. For four years, never mentioned. I’d go to countries all over the world. SDGs would be at the center. I’d meet with the head of state: “Professor Sachs. We take the SDGs very seriously.” I’ve never heard that in Washington. This is partly a country that is so, so obsessed with itself that it’s not looking to the rest of the world.

Jay Famiglietti:
I think that became clear to me when I went to graduate school and started interacting with people from all over the world, and you realize that they have a much broader worldview. Here I was, this young guy in graduate school, only thinking about the United States. So I understand. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the SDGs. In my travels, I’ve seen universities around the world actually building maybe master’s degrees in graduate programs, maybe even a little undergraduate work around the SDGs. Have you seen any of that?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Oh, I’ve been trying as much as I can to promote it. When the idea of the SDGs was first announced, that was back in 2012, three years before they were actually negotiated and agreed. I was advisor to secretary general, Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations. We discussed the idea of mobilizing universities for the SDGs, knowing that they would come in due course. So we set up the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It now has around 1,500 member organizations, many in Canada, many in the United States, Mexico, throughout the Americas, all through Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia. It’s very impressive and fun to see universities taking up this cause with a great deal of excitement and energy because you and I know, we have the feeling there’s so much knowledge that can be brought to bear to solve our problems and to address the ways to achieve the SDGs.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Now, they don’t always know it because universities can be inward-looking themselves. More and more, they’re outward looking, but they can be inward looking. We’re going to do our research. We’re going to train. That’s what we’re going to do. But a lot of universities realize we have a regional, a local, and a global mission. That’s true for our students. It’s true for our research. It’s true for the fact that we are bringing together knowledge from a lot of different disciplines.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I really like the Greek word for universities, panepistimiou, which means all knowledge. So this is a great idea. I loved directing the Earth Institute at Columbia University because we had from the law school, we had from teachers college, we had from the medical school, from school of public health, from the engineering school, from different faculties of arts and sciences, from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. We had wonderful scientists and experts working across so many disciplines with a common purpose, which is let’s figure out how to reduce poverty. Let’s figure out how to grow more food more efficiently. Let’s figure out how to decarbonize the energy system.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, we’re doing a podcast called Let’s Talk About Water. So why don’t we do that? Let’s talk a little bit about water. During your Q&A after your talk at the People Around the World Conference here at USask, and we’ll provide a link to that on our website, you and I talked a little bit about water governance and the need for regional governance, say, around large trans boundary river basins or aquifers and a global body. Is that a model that you’ve seen used successfully in other areas of economic development or other SDGs?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, Jay, as you know, water’s life, as is said, and water is pervasive in the SDGs. It’s featured in SDG six, of course, which is water for all, including sanitation, sewage, ground water, water systems, water management. But it’s part of just about every other SDG also for health, for growing food, for sustainable agriculture, for ecosystem conservation and stability, for climate change. It’s everywhere. But I was thinking about it. You have one of the toughest policy problems ever. And the reason is when I look at your great research, Jay, you’re talking about groundwater, something not seen, not understood, that is in crisis, that is depleting, where the people living above this unseen groundwater depend on the water for their livelihoods, for their food, for their survival, and the water’s depleting.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Now, I deal with a lot of problems in the SDGs, and I can tell you even when the problem is above ground, even when it is smack in your face, when you are cutting down trees, when you have a pandemic, when you have people hungry before your eyes, we are just bad at even handling the things we see, much less the things we don’t see. So the governance of groundwater has to be one of the toughest policy problems and challenges in the world, but you more than anybody know what an incredible proportion of the world living on the groundwater, off of the groundwater, I should say, above the groundwater, but not realizing all of the dangers at hand, the depletion, the challenges and so on.

Jay Famiglietti:
So this challenge of trying to manage this invisible resource, thank you for highlighting that.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Isn’t it incredible, Jay, you had to put satellites up of this exquisite sensitivity to understand what’s going on under the ground. That, by the way, is so counterintuitive, that people need really to understand that because the way to figure out what’s under the ground is through a satellite.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. So that satellite that you’re talking about is called GRACE. It stands for gravity recovery and climate experiment. It’s a NASA mission and it really functions more like a scale than it does an optical satellite. It’s not like it’s taking pictures or like a telescope. It’s more like a scale. So it allows us to weigh the regions of the world that are gaining or losing water mass on a monthly basis. It has completely revealed the global nature of groundwater depletion. And that’s what’s driven my interest in the governance because I’ve been watching this for 20 years and all these aquifers are just one direction. They’re just going down, down, down, down, down with respect to their depletion.

Jay Famiglietti:
So that’s what’s gotten me into the governance game, and that’s why I asked you about pretty obvious that you would need these regional bodies that are focused on a river basin or an aquifer, if we’re talking about groundwater, and then some kind of global coordination. So we’re trying to work on it. But as you know, as a faculty member, it’s tough to get that kind of funding. You need some kind of foundation or some sort of very open competition if it’s a federal competition.

Jeffrey Sachs:
We need new kinds of governance for all of these challenges because political systems don’t address long term problems. They don’t address science-based solutions. They don’t address regional problems that cross national boundaries or global problems. So the time dimension, the knowledge dimension, the cooperative dimension all fall very far short of what we need. When it comes to water, we have the river basin challenge that the great rivers, they need regional cooperation, the Mekong with China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so forth, very complicated. The upstream country, in this case China, often builds dams without understanding or caring enough about the hydrology of what’s going to happen downstream. Same with India and Bangladesh on the Ganges. One could go on and on around the world. So these are regional problems that reflect a combination of urgency, need, power, who’s upstream, who’s downstream.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Then you have shared groundwater, in which case, sometimes just millions of farmers have put their wells down without any restraint because you pull up what you can. One of my wonderful hydrology colleagues Human Ulau, told me the story of visiting an area of groundwater depletion in Northern India. He went to the local district water commissioner and he said, “Do you know the water table is falling several meters a year?” Actually, I think it was, but it was falling very fast. He said, “You’re going to have depletion very soon. It’s very serious.” The commissioner says, “I know.” He says, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” He said, “Well, what should we do about it?” There was no plan. It was more or less fatalistic. The water is going to go down. We have no alternative, no plan, but we have a large number of people, millions of people who are depending on wells tapping this groundwater. That is the reality that we face.

Jay Famiglietti:
That was our first big paper, by the way. The paper we wrote on Northwestern India using the GRACE mission to identify groundwater depletion from space. That was the first time that I actually realized that I might be working on something important, and that was the paper that came out in 2009. It was after that then we started seeing these spots on our maps all over the world. And they were all of the major aquifers. So India is probably in the worst shape, but the Middle East and in particular Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Beijing, of course California, the High Plains Aquifer in the United States, the Guarani Aquifer in South America. This is happening all over the world.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Precisely because it’s not seen, it is so easy to put out of mind. Oh, yeah, that’s what they say. Well, something will come up. We don’t know what. And in the meantime, this hidden process is so pernicious and so dangerous for the future.

Jay Famiglietti:
Most of us in academics, we tend to focus on our next journal article or proposal, but on top of doing that in your career, you’ve written eight books since the early 2000s, including three New York Times bestsellers. You’ve advised countries on economic development since the 1980s, and you’ve recently started an international book club. As a professor, I’m wondering how do you fit it all in and how your family still speaks to you?

Jeffrey Sachs:
We do it together. It is a kind of family venture, actually. My wife is a public health specialist, a MD who taught me about clinical practice. I like to adopt the idea of clinical economics at least to try at some distance, to take on what I’ve learned from her wonderful clinical medicine. She’s a public health specialist. My daughter, the older daughter teaches at Columbia University and works on sustainable investment and the international legal system. So we’re quite engaged. In fact, it is a kind of family venture. There’s a strong bond with all of the kids and with my wife. It comes also from years of travel together.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Starting back in the mid-1980s, I got involved in advising governments on economic policy. Our kids were very young. My wife’s a pediatrician. It was safe to take the kids. You know you had the pediatrician traveling with you and we went all over the world to more than a hundred countries, saw societies, cultures all over the world. I think all of us fell in love with this wonderful, diverse world and all of the excitement and benefits of working across cultures and across societies to address common issues and challenges. And so in this sense, I think the real answer to your question is it’s not hard in the sense that we are all engaged in the endeavor. But it’s a lot of time and a lot of work, no doubt. But I found in my career the joy of combining the academic side, meaning, traditionally, writing journal articles, teaching classes with the thrill but also the learning that can only come through practice and experience to be the combination that fit for me.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I kind of stumbled into it back in the 1980s when some former students asked me to help advise on a hyperinflation in Bolivia that was now 36 years ago. I said, “That’s a good way to do things. Work on practical problems, write journal articles.” And that was 36 years ago. And I found it to be a very rewarding way to proceed.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, it’s so great that you’ve been able to share this with your family and it’s become a family enterprise. Makes all the difference. It’s also great to hear because oftentimes a lot of my mentors who were some high flying hydrologists, they’re divorced.

Jeffrey Sachs:
If I was not able to travel with my wife and family, you could not do this kind of work, really, in a family life because up until COVID now, this is the longest stretch, I think, for so many of us, but for me, it’s the longest stretch in 40 years for sure, probably 50 years, that I’ve not been on a plane. But up until then, and up until the moment in March, 2020, when we stopped traveling because of COVID, we were scheduled for moving every day for several months forward to South America, to Europe, to Asia, it was an almost nonstop travel plan from March until the end of October. Of course, everything got immediately scrapped understandably. Now, it’s zooming around the world every day. But the truth is one has to be and see places to properly understand them. So I’m looking forward very much as we all are to getting back to at least some travel again, and some opportunity to see places face to face.

Jay Famiglietti:
So let’s talk about your new book, The Ages of Globalization. I just got my copy yesterday. So I have to admit to only skimming through it, and like I said earlier, really dug right into the digital age. I want to chat with you about you start with the role of the horse and eventually the steam engine in shaping globalization because of what these new technologies allowed humans to do, like improve agriculture or suddenly travel, like we were just talking about, great distances. Is there an equivalent in the current age, the digital age?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Everything in the digital age is happening at a pace that is unprecedented. We’re living in the era of Moore’s Law, which everybody knows is the doubling of computer capacity, transistor count ability to store, manipulate, and transmit data taking place roughly every two years, sometimes even faster than that since the late 1950s, since the development of the integrated circuit at the end of the 1950s, allowing the use of transistors on a mass basis. Everything about information, transmission of information, computation, storage, artificial intelligence, everything has expanded beyond imagining until very, very recently. And that is changing every part of our society, every sector of the economy is being transformed: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, the service sector. The fact that we were able as a world to go online almost immediately a year ago with of course hardships for people who can’t work online, but an amazing proportion of the world economy that could move online shows how rapidly the digital age has penetrated every part of society.

Jeffrey Sachs:
We know, you know it in your satellite measurements and we know it in the real time data that are pervasive in the world, in the artificial intelligence systems, in the design of these new vaccines. It’s all information. It’s all the digital revolution. It is changing geopolitics. It’s changing what poor countries can do to leapfrog. Suddenly, you can have students anywhere online. You need a bit of hardware, but not so expensive. You can have healthcare available anywhere. You can have radiologists reading x-rays where there are no radiologists within hundreds of miles because everything can be done digitally in that way. You can have government services online. We have at universities, of course, tens of thousands of journals immediately available to us. I used to go to a library. Probably you did too, but the library is now instantaneous, at our fingertips, and the speed of knowledge transmission, the amount of information we can gather is astounding. So the digital age is fundamentally different, I think, from the past.

Jeffrey Sachs:
As every age that I discuss in the book has shown, new technologies lead to dramatic disruptions in the workforce, in the way we live, in governance and in geopolitics and often disastrously. So part of what I’m arguing in this book is let’s get a grip to understand the digital age and not fall into the traps of the past where these new technologies lead to geopolitical stresses that then turn into conflict. Most importantly, I’m saying, let us cooperate with China because suddenly in this digital period it’s gotten into people’s heads, in the United States especially, China’s an enemy. That’s a typical kind of reaction when another major country starts catching up. They’re an enemy. They’re not an enemy, but if we treat China as an enemy, they can become an enemy. We can really end up with conflict. So part of my reading of history and part of my purpose of writing this book is that we can trap ourselves through false psychological concepts, especially us versus them concepts and get to a place we absolutely don’t want to be.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting way to put it. False psychological concepts. I like that. And we fall into those traps even in our daily lives.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Jay, it is really our stone age emotions and one of the theories of Ed Wilson, and it goes back to Charles Darwin is that we are primed for us versus them competition. So the old competition, 50,000 years ago, used to be one tribe against another fighting over a campsite or over access to water. But it is probably our hard psychology, our confirmation bias. We’re great. The others are evil. They’re trying to do us in. And we talk ourselves into a frenzy that can be extremely dangerous, and we know that outbreaks of war can happen for no deep reason, just stupid psychological reasons.

Jay Famiglietti:
And I don’t think the last four years in the United States helped at all.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, it helped only in the sense of reminding us how fragile everything is and we’re still living in the realization. For me, it’s a tough realization how divided the US is, how many bad instincts there are because there’s a lot of racism around. A lot of the divisions are about race divisions, white supremacy that we thought had been banished or hoped had been banished at least, showed up with greater force, people not repudiating Trump even when he was as vulgar and nasty as could be. I don’t like it. Doesn’t make me feel good, makes me worried. But I think it’s very important that we understand these frailties and how dangerous they can be.

Jay Famiglietti:
In the book, you’ve got a really great quote from Adam Smith about capitalism being mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements. To summarize Smith is saying that through trade, we’ll see a spread of knowledge that will eventually allow for a balance of power. It’s been over 250 years since Adam Smith wrote those words. Do you think we’re getting closer to fighting that power balance?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Smith wrote, in what you are referring to, a most remarkable set of observations. What he is saying at that part of the Wealth of Nations is a great masterpiece. He says that the discovery of the sea roots to the Americas and to Asia are the two most significant events in the history of mankind. He’s writing in 1776 about events that took place in 1492 and 1498. And it’s a striking observation to say two most important events. Then he explains why. He says because when Europe connected with the Americas by sea and when Europe connected with Asia by sea for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, actually since the end of the crossing of the Bering Strait, probably 12 or 13,000 years ago, all of humanity was connected. Now there was truly worldwide exchange starting in the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th century.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Even when he was writing two-and-a-half centuries after that, he says these events are so momentous that their consequences still can’t be foreseen. But as a great humanist, he makes a point that he says by nature, connecting the world should be good for everybody. We can trade with each other. We can exchange. He said, but in practice it was a disaster for one part of the world, the native inhabitants, because they were basically overawed by the power of the Europeans, by the musket, by the conquistadores on horseback, because the Americas didn’t have horses. They had been driven to extinction 10,000 years earlier. And so what happened when this connection was made, the native inhabitants, as Smith calls them, succumbed. It also turns out they succumbed to Old World pathogens that they hadn’t been exposed to until the Europeans showed up on the Colombian voyages. So smallpox and other Old World diseases ravaged the New World populations.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, the point that your excerpt makes, Smith says what a tragedy that what should have been for the benefit of the whole world only benefited the Europeans, in fact, at that time. But he says over time, there will be the spread of knowledge so that the now forlorn conquered part of the world will rise in force to match the power of the Old World. It’s phenomenal. What a vision, by the way, what a humanitarian vision that he looks forward to the shared prosperity rather than gloating in the English superiority. He says, no, no. We need every part of the world to benefit.

Jeffrey Sachs:
What is happening, Jay, right now is Smith’s vision. Because after all, Asia, which did not have that burst of technological advance that came to Europe, or that lagged far behind it, even though Asia had been the technology leader of humanity for so long, Asia fell far behind by the 20th century. Much of it was colonized. Much of it was conquered. Much of it was, almost all of it was subordinate to the West. But now we see that Asia is rising in power, in economy, in technological prowess. And I say, good. That is what we have hoped for throughout history. This should not be a European-led world or a North Atlantic-led world of Europe, the United States, and Canada. This should be a true world venture of prosperity and sustainability. So I like what’s happening in Asia, but I see the panic of the policy planners in Washington who think it’s just the most dangerous and worst thing possible that China is catching up. It’s not the worst thing possible. It is what we want to happen worldwide. We want prosperity to be shared.

Jay Famiglietti:
So I just want to tell you a quick story. About 10 years ago, when I was in the US, I’m in Canada now. When I was in the US, I was spending a lot of time going to Washington, DC and briefing different agencies and Congress about these results that we were talking about, these results that were coming out of our global satellite work. And so this really disturbing picture starts to emerge and points to the potential of conflict over shared river basins and the loss of water in the basins and groundwater. So we were at the Pentagon and we’re in the office of Net Assessment and we’re having a conversation. I can’t remember. I think his name was Marshall. He was an advisor to past presidency. They called him Yoda. That’s what I remember. But anyway, I showed him this global map of all these hotspots all around the world and tinder boxes, and the one place he zeroed in on was China. And this was 10 years ago. He just said, “I don’t care about all that. What’s happening in China?”

Jeffrey Sachs:
You know, it is a kind of affliction of the American psyche. In the early 1940s, Henry Luce, who was then publisher of Time Magazine christened the period the American Century, and Americans became very arrogant, that is US America became very arrogant and said, “Okay, we run the show.” And like many empires of the past, came to believe that the US power was somehow a US privilege to be there permanently and unequally. To my mind, this arrogance continues to afflict America today because the world is seen as a zero sum struggle. The world is seen as a competition between the United States and China, but the world should not be seen as a zero sum struggle, that when some other part of the world improves, it’s worse for America. Or, to take the other example that when some other part of the world looks like it may suffer some hardship, that that’s an advantage for America. This kind of zero sum thinking is an arrogance of power in my view, and a mistake of fundamental significance because it leads to conflict rather than cooperation.

Jay Famiglietti:
You have a new project, The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Well, like you, I’m having fun talking to people that, well, I hope I shouldn’t say it on this episode, that are fun to talk to, but in general, I’m sure-

Jay Famiglietti:
You’re fun. We’re having a great time.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I’m sure you’ve been doing that. And I have been spending a lot of the COVID isolation reading books and listening to books because I’m not running between airports, which would’ve been the normal way of much of my day. I have more time on my hands to read, to think. One of the joys is that every day, during a long walk to break the COVID isolation, a long walk in the park, I’m listening to audiobooks. So I’ve been listening to a lot of history, a lot of American history, a lot of world history, and I decided I wanted to speak to these authors. They’re wonderful. I’m learning so much from them. So it’s actually an opportunity for me to meet some of the people that I admire and that I’m listening to, but what a wonderful chance, I think, for people all over the world, which is the idea of the book club, to read books together, and then for us to have the conversation with the author, to have chat rooms, questions, and discussion. That’s how the book club is unfolding this year.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Boy, are we speaking with some fantastic authors and their work has been so eye opening for me. It’s open. It’s free. I welcome everybody to join.

Jay Famiglietti:
So you write all these books, Jeff, you advise UN secretaries general, you’ve traveled and lecture all over the world. You get to hang out with Bono and Angelina Jolie. What keeps you grounded?

Jeffrey Sachs:
Ah-ha. No. Well, what keeps me grounded right now, like all of us, is waiting for the pandemic to end that I [inaudible 00:39:20]

Jay Famiglietti:
That’s right. Waiting for your vaccine.

Jeffrey Sachs:
I hope we’re not so grounded after that in the literal sense. But what keeps me grounded is what we’ve been talking about, a lot of things to do, a lot of reasons to do them, a lot of wonderful students who are taking on now these challenges and you want to help in every way you can. So I think just the opportunity and the weight of our affairs right now worldwide tells us we better act, Jay. I so much appreciate what you are doing to alert the world to these unseen, but huge, huge challenges. And I just want to do my part to help propagate that knowledge.

Jay Famiglietti:
Jeff, thanks so much for spending some very high quality time with us today on Let’s Talk About Water. We really, really appreciate it.

Jeffrey Sachs:
Great to see you. Thanks.

Jay Famiglietti:
Jeffrey Sachs is a world renowned economics professor, a bestselling author, an innovative educator, and a global leader in sustainable development. You can find out more about his recent book, The Ages of Globalization, and about his new Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs at his website jeffsachs.org, that’s S-A-C-H-S. You can also find Jeff on Twitter @jeffdsachs, on LinkedIn @jefferysachs, and on Facebook @Jeffrey.sachs.165.

Jay Famiglietti:
Who knows? Maybe this conversation is my gateway to an exciting path as a New York Times bestselling author, maybe a Jeff Sachs book club guest…”Jay Famiglietti, New York Times bestselling author” That has a pretty nice ring to it. But before I keep dreaming about my elusive book, I have to tell you about all of the other Let’s Talk About Water projects that are actually happening and that you can be a part of while we take a break here on the podcast until season three. We have over 15,000 US dollars up for grabs with our Let’s Talk About Water film festival in June, 2021. All you have to do is submit a water-related two minute film to the Let’s Talk About Water Water Film Prize by April 30th. For more information, and to register, just head to letstalkaboutwater.ca or find the link in the show description.

Jay Famiglietti:
Hopefully, that will keep everyone busy while patiently waiting for season three of our show. Thanks to everyone who helped put this season together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura McFarlan, Amy Hergott, Jesse Witow, Shawn Ahmed, Nikki Manfreddi, Stacey Dumanski, Phani Adapa, Tyrone Miranda, Fred Reibin, Erin Stephens, Zoe Bulia Prpick, and our producer, Sean Prpick. Special thanks to our spiritual leader, Linda Lilienfeld, and make sure to keep those notifications set to hear when we’re back with season three. Don’t worry. We’re still on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many other quality podcasting platforms, so you can go back and listen to all the previous episodes as I actually just did a couple of weeks ago. You can also stream us on Facebook at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast or follow us on Twitter @ltawpodcast. Until next season, my friends. We’ll see you downstream.

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