May 30, 2023 • 39 mins
The historian Douglas Brinkley has written over 20 books on everything from the American space program to Rosa Parks. But more than any other subject, his work has touched on the environment—Teddy Roosevelt’s pioneering preservation work, F.D.R.’s under-appreciated efforts to protect America’s public lands, the fight to save Alaska’s disappearing wilderness, and so forth. On this week’s episode of Table for Two, Bruce Bozzi and Brinkley consider his latest book, The Silent Spring Revolution, and explore how one woman, Rachel Carson, launched an ecological revolution that in turn led to the Clean Air Acts, Earth Day, and a healthy number of popular environmental songs by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Neil Young. Hear a preview of the episode below, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, everybody, Today is a beautiful day on Table for two.
We're back at the Bustling Tower Bar in Los Angeles,
and we're having lunch with renowned historian and New York
Times best selling author Doug Brinkley.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey, welcome, Hey, great.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
To do this with you.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
My friend Doug is not only close friends with Seampan,
They've spent time together in unpredictable places like New Orleans
after Katrina and Haiti after the twenty ten earthquake. He's
also friends with George and Amal Cloney and works real
close with the Clooney Foundation. A professor at Rice University
with seven honorary doctorates, Doug has written countless best selling
(00:44):
books and won too many awards to list, including a Grammy.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I mean, the list goes on and on.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I haven't eaten anything.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Oh you haven't. Okay, good? Do you have some lunch
here with me?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
His latest book is called Silent Spring Revolution, and it
pays tribute to the environmental crusaders of the nineteen sixties
like John F.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Kennedy and Rachel Carson.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's a fascinating read and shows how one person really
can make a difference. Now I call you the brad
Pit of American Historians just say, like, we are sitting
with Doug Brinkley, the bit of American Historians. So pour
yourself a drink and grab a bite to eat, because
we're having lunch with Doug Brinkley. I'm Bruce Bosi and
(01:33):
this is my podcast Table for two.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So, Doug your book, there's a lot here.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Can you sort of encapsulate it if you were to
sort of just kind of drill down for someone like
myself who isn't the most in touch or educated in
this area.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It's a birth of the environmental movement in my book,
and how they did it, how a generate forged forward,
put out all the Paul Revera alarms, created Earth date consciousness,
and made us understand that we have to be planetary stewarts.
We failed that generation, didn't. They got a lot done
in the United States legislation wise, but we're failing them,
(02:17):
and so we need a new wave. We're waiting for
what I would call the fourth wave of environmental activism.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
You know, on the cover of this book, Rachel Carson
I was like, you know, I don't really.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Know about this woman.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So I've been reading her book Silent spring, and there
are several things that have popped out with me. And
one of the things she says is, you know, now
from conception to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
The grave, you have things in you as a result
of the pesticides.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And she says it's ironic that man might determine his
own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice
of an insects break. So kind of talk about that
moment and who this woman was, and also in context,
you know, people get stuck with thinking Doug. As an individual,
I can only do so much. But as an individual,
this woman did a significant amount of things.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, I once got to be Rosa Parks's biographer, and
I spent a lot of time with Missus Parks in
Detroit and Montgomery and here in Beverly Hills. And it's
just one woman who created a revolution. And Rachel Carson
is like that. She grew up in Springdale, Pennsylvania, on
the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh, and it was unregulated factories,
(03:29):
including a glue factory that was poisoning the air and
water near where her backyard was, and so she became
kind of an instinctive environmentalist, wanting to clean the Allegheny
and beautify her area. But she never saw an ocean
as a girl. And she went to a women's college
outside of Pittsburgh, but got a scholarship fellowship to go
to Woods Hole. Woods Hole was worth knowing about. It
(03:52):
still exists. It's on caick Cod by Hyanna'sport, and it
is the vortex of marine studies if you wanted to
study whales or nurse sharks or shad.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I don't have to remember that from my daughter. She
loves everything marine.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Because they built on the ocean a giant red brick library.
In early they started collecting there any book, any pamphlet
about the seas. So if you wanted to go now
with the internet world and you know, you can find stuff,
but back in the early twenty century, this was where
you headed. And she got very interested in eels, which
do migratory journeys, like all the way from Africa across
(04:29):
the ocean. So an eel and the Allegheny River could
have come all the way from Africa. That fascinated her
that they had migratory patterns, not unlike birds that go
long distances. And she started writing for the Baltimore Sun.
She got a zoology degree at Johns Hopkins. During World
War Two, she started writing radio scripts and was on
(04:50):
radio about oceans. And then she wrote in nineteen forty one,
at the beginning of World War two, a book about
the oceans, and she became nation. Jacquesstou of Pros.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Wow, I've never heard of her, like you would think
in history class at some point you will elementary to
high school, this woman would have been.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
You would have thought in her sea books are timeless.
They're not something you know, a silent spring, which talk
about in a minute is of a time. But her
books on the oceans are the most beautiful things ever written.
She writes about you know, she would travel the seashores.
Her favorite milieu was the Atlantic, and so she would
go her summer home in Maine, Cape Cod you know.
(05:32):
But she loved places like Cumberland Island, Georgia, and Cape Lookout,
North Carolina, along those open beach stretches, and she'd collect specimens.
So she was all of that about oceans. But she
started after you know. World War two is the defining
point in my book because Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We win
the war of the United States, but at what cost
(05:54):
to develop nuclear weapons?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yes, and that is something that I also want to
have from your our historian point of view. That moment
the Truman administration decided to do that, well, the.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
First bomb at Hiroshima happened, and it did create a
little bit of concern with some smart people that said,
no more, what are you doing? That was the civilian
population Roseroma. And one of the people that complained about
it was Joe Kennedy, the father of future President John F. Kennedy,
who wanted to see Henry Lucid Time magazine and his
(06:27):
local bishop and the Catholic Church say can we get
to know more of this? But Truman dropped a second
and no sooner did the detonation go off than a
man named Norman Cousins wrote a long essay called is
Man Obsolete? And in that Cousin says, this is a
whole new age where now we can blow the planet desmitterings.
(06:48):
Everything's over what we used to know, And unluckily for us,
the United States government started testing nuclear bombs willy nilly,
blowing up the Marshall Islands, making indigenous people their going
into Nevada, and blowing up atomic bombs. From nineteen forty
five to nineteen ninety two, the United States detonated one
(07:10):
thousan fifty four nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
So it was it was radioactive, but people thought that
the radioactivity or would stay maybe and only affect indigenous
people in Nevada and New Mexico. Well, it blew and
the wind blew and people were getting radiation spikes up
all the way in New York. And so you have
(07:34):
and then DDT, which was sprayed in World War two
as a miracle because it killed lice, it killed ticks,
and it killed mosquitoes. So if you were a soldier
fighting in the Philippines or you know, Okinawa or something,
you'd get doused in it and to avoid malaria. But
(07:54):
the scientists in our US government started testing at a
place called Paul TuS in Maryland, said, oh, this is
a death merchant. This is well, it's killing fish, it's
sterilizing animals, it's you know, the all the eggshells are thinning.
And yet we were spraying all across the United States
(08:15):
forty five to sixty two, crop spraying DDT everywhere, And
so there became these lanes of environmentalists no more nuclear
testing group. Rachel Carson was part of that, No more
DDT spray indiscriminately. Rachel Carson was part of that. And
Rachel Carson was part of a seashore preservation movement which said,
(08:38):
my god, we're building condos right on the water in
Miami and New Jersey. We need some fresh stretches of
open beach for the public. And that seashore movement leads
to John F. Kennedy creating Cape cod National Seashore, Point
Raised National Seashore up in morin South Padre Island, Texas.
(09:00):
And then they moved and Kennedy johnsoniers to say Fire
Island National Seashore in New York, Actique in Maryland, Virginia,
on and on, and they were smart enough in the
sixties and say, let's save the Great Lakes, this great
freshwater body. So we saved national parks all along the
Great Lakes, like the Apostle Islands in northern Wisconsin twenty
(09:22):
two drop dead gorgeous islands and you can canoe and
kayak too, and Sleeping Bear Dunes, these massive dunes on
Lake Michigan, and all this got saved.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Would have been gone.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Oh it was on its way out.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Everything gone.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I mean, it's fascinating, and it's happening today too, Doug.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It's like the divide. It's like there are the people
that understand that and see that, and there are.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
People that are looking to develop it and make money
off of it or what have you. And she as
the individual, Rachel Carson, I know there are a number
of things that got passed through legislation that have affected
all of us in a positive way as the individual,
Like the Clean Air Act.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Well, if we were coming for a lunch like this
in say nineteen sixty and right in you know Hollywood,
you know West Hollywood, if we came here, it would
have been pollution everywhere Downtown La Small you couldn't breathe,
and Pasadena was particularly bad. Yeah, and so you couldn't.
People were getting sick just being in Los Angeles. And
(10:23):
yet this was paradise. You were supposed to come to
southern California because it was the prettiest place on the exactary.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
In nineteen seventy seven, the first time I ever came
to La I was with my parents.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
We were flying in. It was so smoggy the plane
couldn't land. They had it diverted to Vegas. We had
to spend the night in Vegas and then fly the
next morning. That's disgusting, disgusting.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
It was that bad. Yeah. In What's in Need, I
write about in the book a group. There's like a
group of women in Pasadena, the smogged Tears that would
hold protest rallies, and a lot of citizens groups rose up,
and there became we needed to detect where's small coming from?
What are the sources? And there were two different ways
(11:04):
to think about. One is stationary industrial source pollution, and
that at dirty Incinerator, a factory that got started getting
cleaner in nineteen sixty three with the Clean Air Act
of sixty three passed right after Kennedy was killed in
Dallas in December. Then there was a second Act nineteen
seventy December, and Nixon signed that and that second Act
(11:27):
went after automobiles. And Nixon, for all of his deep flaws,
had an ear for constituent politics and on the environment.
In nineteen sixty eight he was running. He did not
care when he ran presientout the environment at all. But
there was a lot of noise in the media culture,
you know, and showing dirty lakes and dying lake erie
(11:47):
and dead birds. But Nixon was president only days when
the Santa Barbara oil spill happened and Santa Barbara paradise.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
So you talk about the significance of that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Wiped out, you know, just black smudge goo everywhere, Birds
stuck in oil, unable to get out. And Nixon started
seeing this happening, and on January one, nineteen seventy, Nixon
at San Clemente signs nipa National Environmental Policy Act. After
that went down, Nixon gave a State of the Union
address January nineteen seventy and in that address, one third
(12:23):
of it was about the environment. Now Earth Day came
and Earth Day was, which it was epics to everybody.
Walter Kronkit covered on it was like the biggest thing,
like or today's Earth Day. Everybody got off from school, people,
every college camp. Yeah, it was the deal, and a
(12:44):
lot of things happened. The music became big out of
that Earth Day. Marvin Gay, Mercy me the ecology, Joni
Mitchell big, you know, Yellow Taxi, Neil Young writing ecological ballads,
a Pete Seeger folk singer working to save the Hudson River.
So musical artists became environmentally significant.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, that late sixties or that seventies genre of Laura
Canyon music.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Of that whole, all those artists. That's when.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Also, I think the magic was happening in Los Angeles.
So interesting that it.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Was they took the environment as a big as you hear,
California was the leader in an environmental stewardship and consciousness.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Welcome back to Table for two.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We've just ordered lunch here at the Tower Bar, and
Doug is telling me all about his new book, Silent
Spring Revolution, the snapshot of the extraordinary people who early
on insisted I'm protecting the earth and its resources. So
let's dive deeper into what inspired Doug to write it. So,
I mean, this book is huge. How long did it
(14:12):
take you to write this and when did you start
to sort of formulate the significance of these particular people.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Well, the great part for me was, unlike when you
deal with the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, they were real environmentalists.
I mean, they're a gold standard. They really prioritized it
less so Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. But they were responsive
and what they responded to was Rachel Carson. She was
like Harriet Beecher, Stowe's uncle Tom's Cabin about slavery, or
(14:44):
there was Upton Saint Clair wrote a book The Jungle,
about dirty meat packing factories in Chicago. Rachel Carson blew
a very loud alarm in Silent Spring that said, we're
destroying the planet. And by our arrogance and our conceits
and by our greed and by our consumerism, run a muck.
We're not regulating things properly, We're not being land and
(15:07):
water stewarts. And so I knew that she would be
the center of my book, and and yet I wanted
to have an ensemble cast. And her relationship with John F.
Kennedy's interesting because if Jack Kennedy did not back her
action she was. He said, I'm gonna put a science panel.
I'm gonna hire the best people, but we're gonna see
(15:29):
whether her book holds up or not, the obvious thing
to do. And the scientist said, oh my god, Rachel
Carson nailed it's that's it's all accurate. And so that
helped you have a president now backing you, a rewriter
like Rachel Carson. And then I noticed Lady Bird Johnson,
(15:50):
a first lady married to Lyndon Johnson. She was a
hardened environmentalist, particularly she was interested in wildflower counts cervation,
but also she was opposed to what they call the
uglies or vulgularization of landscapes. She wanted to make sure
parts of America stay beautiful more in a pristine way.
(16:12):
And she she would travel all over his first lady
and go down the Rio Grande River in a raft,
or you know, go on kayaking in the Snake River
of Idaho, or go up to the redwoods up in Mendocino,
Humboldt County, California. So she was an activist environmental first Lady,
which was helpful because she carried a big celebrities Filowl
(16:34):
Life and yeah, and then Hollywood. You know, I write
in the book that Walt Disney was a Republican, but
he was an unusual Republican that he had that in
the sense that his big love was critters, like if
he lived all animals, like when he lived here in California.
You know, other people might complain about deer in their backyard,
(16:56):
bamby in their backyard, or what he never did. And
he saw the potential animation of watching these animals up
close their habits, their movements, and so he did a
group of films called Disney True Adventures, which would run
and it had a profound effect because he would show
the life of a coyote, and up until Disney, people
(17:18):
all over America put cyanide to poison the coyotes because
they were considered a vermin and an enemy to the
ranchers to cast sheep, and Disney makes them cuddly pops
living with mom rolling down a hill, you know. So
there became in the sixties, We've got to save this
Noah's arc of species. That how we're lucky we can
(17:39):
still do it. We can save the manatee in Florida,
or with Florida panther, we can save a condor in Arizona, or.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
The Big Big Deal.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Very and your friendships with Sean Penn and George Clooney
and Brad pitt to you know, tell us about those relationship.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
I'm very close with Sean. Sean Penn is a good
friend of mine and I'm always proud of him, and
I tell him I'm proud of him. I'm proud that
he beyond being this extraordinary actor, who could you know,
do milk or Mystic River and his resume is so long.
The other side of him, which is an activist side.
When I was in New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina, he'd
(18:24):
go down to film in New Orleans and lot Sean.
In fact, he has tattooed on his side NOLA, New Orleans,
you know, Louisiana on his arm.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
He wrote a book based on your experience with Sean
about Katrina. And it also comes up as a question
to me, like why was that not the moment that
everyone just said, okay, this.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Is that should have been But okay, and we were
living I was living in Katrina through Katrina, stayed in
at Tulane and Sean came in. I evacuated after it,
and he came in and we insinuated ourselves past roads, blocks,
a police you know, and we were in the dark
in city. We stayed together in this I knew one
(19:02):
home of a guy who had a generator, and so
Shawn and I would stay there. And then Matt Tyabe,
a writer from Rolling Stone, was around for a while.
But we would get a boat through Nick Robertson of CNN,
and I was able to procure little boats, so we
would go out and do rescue missions and you know,
it was amazing to me because Shawn got on the
boat and hop in and but some of these people
(19:24):
lost everything. They're in water. They're sitting on a front
porch stoop with water surrounding them, and suddenly they would
look up and say.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Sean Penn, I saw you and.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
You said that right, and you're talking about about Shawn's
movies while your.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Wife is gone down.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
But we would bring people up to Saint Charles Avenue
and then to a Turo hospital. And you know, he's
a natural leader, Sean, and he has a great leadership.
He could have been colonel or a captain in army
completely because he's able to mobilize people and move he
does logistics surprisingly well. And so after that we just
(20:08):
started doing different things. So I wrote a portrait of
Sean and a long profile for Vanity Fair and Haiti.
It was only one of my visits to Haiti, but
I visited Sewn a bunch of times down there, helping
doing what I could do as a writer, but also
by profiling Sean and Vanity Fair about what he was
doing in Haiti, bringing consciousness to it. And I'm collect
(20:31):
friends through Sean like that. There's a General Ken Keene,
who was the head of the Southern Command in Haiti.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And I was with Sean.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
It was this, you know, strange Haitian knight, importer of Prince.
And Sean's smoking his cigarette and we went together to
go meet the general running the thing and Sean puts
his cigarette behind his back like like that. The general
doesn't see it, and he goes. He goes, Sean smoke,
that's a perfectly good cigarette and it should not go
to waste, and started smoking in and they got along
(21:03):
really well. And here I watched Sean in bed with
the military in a way that was really interesting and helpful.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It seems like that's unique, like that you throw yourself
into it right at the front lines.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
What motivates maybe both Sean and I are frustrated. We
want to be and we want to be like combat
reporters like we want to be We want to be
like Ernest Hemingway or Stephen Crane.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
And do you ever get scared when you're in those.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
You know, because I really take care of myself, you know,
I do, But I'm so cautious. Like when I was
in Haiti, everybody else was telling me, like somebody got
sick from a shower, you know, from the water, wondering
about and so I was like, I like I do it.
I was like doing bottled water spongebag. And I wasn't risky,
you know. I saw others like, oh it was only
(22:00):
one person. It's like ones enough, man, I ain't going.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
In that shower.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
So I have preservation strategies. I'm not quite brave good,
but yeah, but you know, we we've had fun and
got many other places. I went with Sean and Christopher
Hitchens to Venezuela and we traveled all over there. We interviewed,
you go Chabas there. I've been with Sean to Cuba
and we would go, so it became part of a routine.
(22:30):
But more than that, I just he's just such a
warm heart and wonderful person. Sean. When you get to
really know him, he's a manch and a beautiful friend
and never forgets me and includes me and things. You know,
here I am teaching at Rice University, and if he
hears I'm coming out here and he's doing some big gala,
he'll just like suddenly plug me in, you know, Like
(22:51):
I'm like I'm at the eight table, and it's like well,
you've earned a seat technically.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And Sean, I had the you know, when Shawn was
really pushing the vaccinations here in Los Angeles. I had
a real incredible afternoon with him where I met him
in Brentwood and I drove in his pickup truck and
I really saw him in action, just as he's smoking
a cigarettes and.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We're driving a Dodger stadium.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And then I, you know, watched him have the meeting
with the team and then go to the field and
really see what was happening, and then go back and
sort of hear his regroup, and I really at one
point just looked at the you know, to my left
in the car and there Sean is all, you know,
weathered and tan and smoking, and I just I just knew.
(23:34):
I this was such a significant moment of watching an
incredible individual make change, which keep going back to individuals
can do things. Thank you for joining us on Table
(24:05):
for two. Doug is not only an award winning author,
but he's also a distinguished historian and has an eye
not only on the past, but on what's happening today too.
I'm curious how Doug thinks we will look back at
this unprecedented moment in history.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
All of us have had the good.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Fortune now to see with these telescopes that are now
showing us what's out there. And then you also remember
the finite time we're on this planet, from conception to grave.
And it astounds me that we don't.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Make the right choices and we're in this war with
each other.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
When these companies make a lot of money, the economic divide,
it gets me nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And so you feel there's hope.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I have to because I teach young people, and so
you know, Witty gut Thrie used to talk about, I'm
a hope machine, and I try to is that like,
I've got to promote hope. And I also learned from
the people I wrote about the book Environmentalist of the
sixties that got it results. You got to make it fun.
A lot of students are very worried about climate change,
(25:12):
as they should be. The bad news is some of
them are freaking out about it, saying, my god, the
planet is doomed. Everything it's lost. And so you try
to say, don't get sick, you know, stay psychologically healthy,
stay physically healthy, and let's get you going on a project.
And it may not be getting off of fossil fuels.
(25:33):
It might be a smaller thing of protecting a local
by you or saving an open story. Small, start, small,
and get it's the taste of victory. Win some local
environmental issue, stop a project that's going to be detrimental
to an estuary or a butterfly habitat, whatever you choose,
(25:54):
and then you'll meet people. You'll network with people, and
that network just has to grow. But it's not going
to There is a spiritual side to the natural world,
and we're going to need all hands on deck to
save the planet. If you can find somebody that's angry
about this, this one percent of corporate greed and extraction industry,
(26:17):
you know, monsters that are just ravaging the planet and
they don't care. You're gonna have to find a very
big alliance of David's to take on that goliath.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
And so it's great to.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Hear you say from your perspective to find the hope
and keep it and lean into like the small, the
small winds, because the small winds are going to get us.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
The good news about the generation Z, the young people
of today, I think they see the electric car for
whatever Tesla and other companies are, they see it's doable.
This is the ni first generation that's growing up that
knows somebody that has an electric car. You know, they
may not be able to afford it, they don't have
it themselves, but they're saying I can that that's gonna happen.
(27:01):
And I think that gives them a little extra impetus
this generation right now that we can maybe do this.
It might be you know, Bob Dylan has a song
called up to Me which was left off of Blood
on the Tracks, but it's on one of his bootlegs.
But you know, Dylan says, you know, nobody else is
singing the song I want to hear, so I guess
it's up to me.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Yeah, And you know or that Michael Jackson facing the
mirror kind of thing. But you know, you got to
sometimes say, look, it's about me. I'm going to do
what I can do without getting sick, without being psychologically
a basket case. I'm going to live a healthy life.
But I'm going to prioritize environmental stewardship any way I can,
and I'm willing to do small victories with my eye
(27:42):
on them on the big one.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Do you think there'll be a time that you the
historian looks back on this time.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
The people that will be live looking back up this time,
we'll look at it and be like, how will they
perceive this time?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I think there'll be a narrative about in the nineteen
fifties with the discovery of DNA, human makeup, of our makeup,
and the same time the computer chip came, you know,
microchip and Texas instruments. And at the same time we
started aiming for the moon with technology, using our missile
(28:26):
war capacity in n NASA to do a moonshot. And
there became technology became the god. People like all this.
Huxley warned about this and Brave New World. You know,
in Huxley's book, you would bless yourself with the tea
of the Model T, but now you would bless yourself
with the tea of technology. And there's a race going
(28:49):
on between the people that don't care what it's happening things.
Technology will fix it. Well, so what if there's wild
buyers here? Technology will figure it out. So it's a
lot of people are praying at the ultra of technology
and that has benefits. Look, when I get sick and
I'm going to a hospital, I'm so glad of new
(29:10):
heart open heart surgery technology. I thank you God for
that technology. And sometimes, you know, when I'm lost and
I can go on GPS, I'm like, thank God for GP.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Can you say to yourself, oh my God, how did
I used to do that?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
We all understand it, but we also need to be
suspicious to take a take a paceback. That's what Rachel
Carson was telling people. You're just praying this DDT all over.
It's killing people. Caesar Chabez started the Mexican American Movement
with pesticides. Keg let's ye know. I mean, let's take
a break here, let's see what's going on. Let's get
(29:48):
more data before we move. And we opened up the
wild West of social media with no data. We just
open open the door.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Everyone just ran it.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
As a historian, in your view, is it your job
to be unbiased, an unbiased reporter, or is it to
be an evaluator of the past who is not unbiased,
but who is responsible for highlighting the important themes and
(30:20):
ideas for the rest of us in building a morality
out of it.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
I've learned to have two hats. One is I try
to be just like if you went to a doctor
you're just doing your diagnosis, or a judge in a
law case, historians trying to a judge or try to
say this is what happened. But on the environment, when
you see the planet being destroyed, I feel I have
a moral obligation, which is ahead of my professional obligation,
(30:46):
to raise whatever alarm bells I can to say that
we are going to have to find a new wave.
We're going to have to have a new silent spring
revolution where people from all walks of life set enough
we're done with fossil fuels. And I know it's global
and it's difficult. I don't believe China's going to help us.
(31:08):
I'm good friends with John Carey. He was trying hard
to do diplomacy with China on climate. It's almost impossible
India polluting. But we can start it here at home.
We can start it in California and let it grow,
and eventually the United States has shown to be such
a dominant country, maybe we are the country that shows
(31:28):
the world that we're done with fossil fuels, that it's
an antiquated form.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Of Yeah, we're going to have to take the lead.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
We're gonna have to be the league. And that's just it,
and it's hard, but it can grow with the movement
has to grow. I wrote in this book, it's not
just Rachel Carson, a scientist, author, or William O. Douglas
Supreme Court justice. But there were Republicans, there were filmmakers,
they're actors, they're artists. We all pitch in school teachers
(31:56):
on Earth Day teaching it. I mean, everybody today knows
what ecology is. I mean that that was a moment.
So this generation, the Baby Boom generation that gets, you know,
criticized a lot actually on the environment. At least created
sustainable ideas for are we do with air water quality,
(32:17):
sewage treatment plants, saved some species that were going extinct
with you know, we moved the bar forward. But since
then it's been in what happened with after the Endangered
Species Act passed in nineteen seventy three, that passed the
Senate ninety two to nothing, very progressive legislation to say wildlife.
(32:39):
That same year they had the Arab oil embargo and
the OPEC countries said, what you know, the Arab countries
united and did price gouging on us and the American
people like recently or complaining about high gasoline at the
pump's inflation. Why aren't we energy independent? And you started
(33:00):
getting the oil gas lobby organizing in a way with
the extraction industries of all kinds, chemical industries to form
a counter punch to the environmentalists. The good news was
the environmental movement got a win win, win win in
the sixties and seventies. It made a difference, But then
they got muted because of the power of money of
(33:21):
these oil and gas people shut it down.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
As our lunch comes to a close, I'm comforted by
Doug's optimism that if we act now, we can still
turn things around.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
But when the stakes are so high, what actions can
we take to protect the future. So, Doug, you know
you do have hope, which is so good to hear.
What can the individual do? What can I do to
help this alone?
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I think if you have the economic means it could
up to transfer to an electric car, do it. If
you can make less of a carbon footprint, do it.
But look, we're busy. Not everybody's keeping tabs of their
carbon footprint, nor can they, And I don't want people
should You can't shame people. We shouldn't be shaming people
(34:18):
on the environment. Look, it's a big mess going on there,
So find something that you like. I like to tell
students the great book by Henry David Thureau Walden's Pond
and he fell in Love with the Pond. And you
read Walden and I would ask people, what's your Walden?
If I ask Bruce, what's the place that you've been
in all your travels that you just love that speaks
(34:40):
to you in the natural world, be a custodian of
that place. Put your heart there and say, I just love,
for whatever reason, the Great Basin National Park in Nevada,
or I just love the big sur coastline. Take the time,
join a friends group there, talk to other people that
love that place, and you'll become a watch dog for
a particular area that we need to hold those heirlooms
(35:04):
down while all of this is in transition right now.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Be a custodian of the place you love. Protect It's
like being taking care of your home, your family. Be
that custodian.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, you know when Doctor Seuss and the Lorax, you
know I speak for the trees. You need to speak
for that one area that meant a lot to you.
I love the Hudson River of the valley. So I'm
working with Sina cuts in and get up and what
can we do to make the river clean or just
one because I like all rivers, but I can be overwhelmed.
And don't beat up on it, don't punish ourselves. Just
(35:37):
be positive, full of love and find a place you
love and work to protect it.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, and I feel like you know the Giving Tree
that book, you know, at the end of the book
when it's just a stump and he says, I have
nothing more to give. There's such a powerful lesson in
that for us today. Absolutely, I don't know where on
the tree we're at.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Hopefully we're at the stump.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, we're not at the stump. That's the good news.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's the glass happened.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
At the stump. It where I'm looking at that stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
We're getting close in the stump.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
I used to be the literary executor. I am of
Hunter Thompson's estate, the wild Guy and all my and
everybody thinks that drugs and alcohol and Hunter is interesting.
The part I liked of Hunter was I went with him.
He was in Whitty Creek, Colorado, and joined the local
Witty Creek council meeting. It's all these like just local people,
and there's Hunter with this, and he would do all
(36:32):
the little things that we're not gonna let the gravel
pit on the road, We're not gonna do it, because
he loved that area and he you know, know that's
an Elk range, You're not going to do it. And
you know, he just did his little part and that
made me see him as a citizen. You know, that's
a calling, that's a citizen. It's really important in out
here what you do. Bruce, and or just an actor
(36:53):
like Leonardo DiCaprio, what he's been doing with ocean awareness.
I've gotten to watch up close, and it's he makes
a difference. He can when he goes to Washington talks
people wake up. John Carey was once tried to ask
me to get Leonardo to come to a big ocean summit.
I was like, I'm not going to get him. But
I went and wrote an email to Michael Metovoy and
(37:15):
Metal Boy his friends. But you know, one thing happened
or another and Leo said, I guess I need to
be there for this, and he said yep. So he
showed up and not only did he give an incredible speech,
but Leo gave him like a million dollar check on
the spot. You know, it's amazing, and you know, so
a lot of the people in the Hollywood community. You
should see yourself as the energizing force for the new
(37:39):
environmental movement that you've got a lot of cloud power
and media access and so use it to combat climate change.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Well, everyone should read this book because I always feel
like you have to understand the foundation to go to
the next level of it. And you know, you can't
just take an amazing photograph. You have to learn the process.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yes, and we've lost the way so to get back there.
This book is an amazing book. It should be talking.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
That's when I wanted to. I think if you read it,
you'll say, up optimistically, we can do this. Now, we
got a big burn, but we can do it. They
took on these challenges. I mean, the bald eagle was
almost extinct. There handfuls left. I remember, we brought it back.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
And you know, we can do a lot.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
A Lake Gary was dead and it's now alive. Kyahga
River on fire. Now it's a national park. We can
do things, and so be hopeful. Read this as like
a road map to twenty first century new environmental wave
waiting for It's been.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
A pleasure having lunch with you, and thank you everyone
for pulling up a chair today.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
And what they didn't see is that I, unfortunately I
went with the pizza and left my kill salad it
to wilt in front of me.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, but you right off the bat well. Thank you, Doug.
I appreciate your time. I appreciate lunch.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Thank you so much. Bruce.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Table for Two with Bruce Bosi is produced by iHeartRadio
seven three seven Park and airmyl Our. Executive producers are
Bruce Bosi and Nathan King. Table for Two is researched
and written by Bridget arsenalt Our sound engineers are Paul
Bowman and Alyssa Midcalf.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Table for two's la production team is Danielle Romo and
Lorraine viz Our.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Music supervisor is Randall poster Our talent booking is by
James Harkin. Special thanks to Amy Sugarman, Uni Cher, Kevin Yuvane,
Bobby Bauer, Alison Kanter Raber, Barbara and Jen and Jeff
Klein and the staff at the Tower Bar in the
world famous Sunset Tower Hotel. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
(39:52):
to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, Today is a beautiful day on Table for two.
We're back at the Bustling Tower Bar in Los Angeles,
and we're having lunch with renowned historian and New York
Times best selling author Doug Brinkley.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey, welcome, Hey, great.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
To do this with you.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
My friend Doug is not only close friends with Seampan,
They've spent time together in unpredictable places like New Orleans
after Katrina and Haiti after the twenty ten earthquake. He's
also friends with George and Amal Cloney and works real
close with the Clooney Foundation. A professor at Rice University
with seven honorary doctorates, Doug has written countless best selling
(00:44):
books and won too many awards to list, including a Grammy.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I mean, the list goes on and on.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
I haven't eaten anything.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Oh you haven't. Okay, good? Do you have some lunch
here with me?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
His latest book is called Silent Spring Revolution, and it
pays tribute to the environmental crusaders of the nineteen sixties
like John F.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Kennedy and Rachel Carson.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's a fascinating read and shows how one person really
can make a difference. Now I call you the brad
Pit of American Historians just say, like, we are sitting
with Doug Brinkley, the bit of American Historians. So pour
yourself a drink and grab a bite to eat, because
we're having lunch with Doug Brinkley. I'm Bruce Bosi and
(01:33):
this is my podcast Table for two.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
So, Doug your book, there's a lot here.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Can you sort of encapsulate it if you were to
sort of just kind of drill down for someone like
myself who isn't the most in touch or educated in
this area.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It's a birth of the environmental movement in my book,
and how they did it, how a generate forged forward,
put out all the Paul Revera alarms, created Earth date consciousness,
and made us understand that we have to be planetary stewarts.
We failed that generation, didn't. They got a lot done
in the United States legislation wise, but we're failing them,
(02:17):
and so we need a new wave. We're waiting for
what I would call the fourth wave of environmental activism.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
You know, on the cover of this book, Rachel Carson
I was like, you know, I don't really.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Know about this woman.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So I've been reading her book Silent spring, and there
are several things that have popped out with me. And
one of the things she says is, you know, now
from conception to.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
The grave, you have things in you as a result
of the pesticides.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
And she says it's ironic that man might determine his
own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice
of an insects break. So kind of talk about that
moment and who this woman was, and also in context,
you know, people get stuck with thinking Doug. As an individual,
I can only do so much. But as an individual,
this woman did a significant amount of things.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, I once got to be Rosa Parks's biographer, and
I spent a lot of time with Missus Parks in
Detroit and Montgomery and here in Beverly Hills. And it's
just one woman who created a revolution. And Rachel Carson
is like that. She grew up in Springdale, Pennsylvania, on
the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh, and it was unregulated factories,
(03:29):
including a glue factory that was poisoning the air and
water near where her backyard was, and so she became
kind of an instinctive environmentalist, wanting to clean the Allegheny
and beautify her area. But she never saw an ocean
as a girl. And she went to a women's college
outside of Pittsburgh, but got a scholarship fellowship to go
to Woods Hole. Woods Hole was worth knowing about. It
(03:52):
still exists. It's on caick Cod by Hyanna'sport, and it
is the vortex of marine studies if you wanted to
study whales or nurse sharks or shad.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I don't have to remember that from my daughter. She
loves everything marine.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Because they built on the ocean a giant red brick library.
In early they started collecting there any book, any pamphlet
about the seas. So if you wanted to go now
with the internet world and you know, you can find stuff,
but back in the early twenty century, this was where
you headed. And she got very interested in eels, which
do migratory journeys, like all the way from Africa across
(04:29):
the ocean. So an eel and the Allegheny River could
have come all the way from Africa. That fascinated her
that they had migratory patterns, not unlike birds that go
long distances. And she started writing for the Baltimore Sun.
She got a zoology degree at Johns Hopkins. During World
War Two, she started writing radio scripts and was on
(04:50):
radio about oceans. And then she wrote in nineteen forty one,
at the beginning of World War two, a book about
the oceans, and she became nation. Jacquesstou of Pros.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Wow, I've never heard of her, like you would think
in history class at some point you will elementary to
high school, this woman would have been.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
You would have thought in her sea books are timeless.
They're not something you know, a silent spring, which talk
about in a minute is of a time. But her
books on the oceans are the most beautiful things ever written.
She writes about you know, she would travel the seashores.
Her favorite milieu was the Atlantic, and so she would
go her summer home in Maine, Cape Cod you know.
(05:32):
But she loved places like Cumberland Island, Georgia, and Cape Lookout,
North Carolina, along those open beach stretches, and she'd collect specimens.
So she was all of that about oceans. But she
started after you know. World War two is the defining
point in my book because Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We win
the war of the United States, but at what cost
(05:54):
to develop nuclear weapons?
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yes, and that is something that I also want to
have from your our historian point of view. That moment
the Truman administration decided to do that, well, the.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
First bomb at Hiroshima happened, and it did create a
little bit of concern with some smart people that said,
no more, what are you doing? That was the civilian
population Roseroma. And one of the people that complained about
it was Joe Kennedy, the father of future President John F. Kennedy,
who wanted to see Henry Lucid Time magazine and his
(06:27):
local bishop and the Catholic Church say can we get
to know more of this? But Truman dropped a second
and no sooner did the detonation go off than a
man named Norman Cousins wrote a long essay called is
Man Obsolete? And in that Cousin says, this is a
whole new age where now we can blow the planet desmitterings.
(06:48):
Everything's over what we used to know, And unluckily for us,
the United States government started testing nuclear bombs willy nilly,
blowing up the Marshall Islands, making indigenous people their going
into Nevada, and blowing up atomic bombs. From nineteen forty
five to nineteen ninety two, the United States detonated one
(07:10):
thousan fifty four nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
So it was it was radioactive, but people thought that
the radioactivity or would stay maybe and only affect indigenous
people in Nevada and New Mexico. Well, it blew and
the wind blew and people were getting radiation spikes up
all the way in New York. And so you have
(07:34):
and then DDT, which was sprayed in World War two
as a miracle because it killed lice, it killed ticks,
and it killed mosquitoes. So if you were a soldier
fighting in the Philippines or you know, Okinawa or something,
you'd get doused in it and to avoid malaria. But
(07:54):
the scientists in our US government started testing at a
place called Paul TuS in Maryland, said, oh, this is
a death merchant. This is well, it's killing fish, it's
sterilizing animals, it's you know, the all the eggshells are thinning.
And yet we were spraying all across the United States
(08:15):
forty five to sixty two, crop spraying DDT everywhere, And
so there became these lanes of environmentalists no more nuclear
testing group. Rachel Carson was part of that, No more
DDT spray indiscriminately. Rachel Carson was part of that. And
Rachel Carson was part of a seashore preservation movement which said,
(08:38):
my god, we're building condos right on the water in
Miami and New Jersey. We need some fresh stretches of
open beach for the public. And that seashore movement leads
to John F. Kennedy creating Cape cod National Seashore, Point
Raised National Seashore up in morin South Padre Island, Texas.
(09:00):
And then they moved and Kennedy johnsoniers to say Fire
Island National Seashore in New York, Actique in Maryland, Virginia,
on and on, and they were smart enough in the
sixties and say, let's save the Great Lakes, this great
freshwater body. So we saved national parks all along the
Great Lakes, like the Apostle Islands in northern Wisconsin twenty
(09:22):
two drop dead gorgeous islands and you can canoe and
kayak too, and Sleeping Bear Dunes, these massive dunes on
Lake Michigan, and all this got saved.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Would have been gone.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Oh it was on its way out.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Everything gone.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I mean, it's fascinating, and it's happening today too, Doug.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
It's like the divide. It's like there are the people
that understand that and see that, and there are.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
People that are looking to develop it and make money
off of it or what have you. And she as
the individual, Rachel Carson, I know there are a number
of things that got passed through legislation that have affected
all of us in a positive way as the individual,
Like the Clean Air Act.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Well, if we were coming for a lunch like this
in say nineteen sixty and right in you know Hollywood,
you know West Hollywood, if we came here, it would
have been pollution everywhere Downtown La Small you couldn't breathe,
and Pasadena was particularly bad. Yeah, and so you couldn't.
People were getting sick just being in Los Angeles. And
(10:23):
yet this was paradise. You were supposed to come to
southern California because it was the prettiest place on the exactary.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
In nineteen seventy seven, the first time I ever came
to La I was with my parents.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
We were flying in. It was so smoggy the plane
couldn't land. They had it diverted to Vegas. We had
to spend the night in Vegas and then fly the
next morning. That's disgusting, disgusting.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
It was that bad. Yeah. In What's in Need, I
write about in the book a group. There's like a
group of women in Pasadena, the smogged Tears that would
hold protest rallies, and a lot of citizens groups rose up,
and there became we needed to detect where's small coming from?
What are the sources? And there were two different ways
(11:04):
to think about. One is stationary industrial source pollution, and
that at dirty Incinerator, a factory that got started getting
cleaner in nineteen sixty three with the Clean Air Act
of sixty three passed right after Kennedy was killed in
Dallas in December. Then there was a second Act nineteen
seventy December, and Nixon signed that and that second Act
(11:27):
went after automobiles. And Nixon, for all of his deep flaws,
had an ear for constituent politics and on the environment.
In nineteen sixty eight he was running. He did not
care when he ran presientout the environment at all. But
there was a lot of noise in the media culture,
you know, and showing dirty lakes and dying lake erie
(11:47):
and dead birds. But Nixon was president only days when
the Santa Barbara oil spill happened and Santa Barbara paradise.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
So you talk about the significance of that, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Wiped out, you know, just black smudge goo everywhere, Birds
stuck in oil, unable to get out. And Nixon started
seeing this happening, and on January one, nineteen seventy, Nixon
at San Clemente signs nipa National Environmental Policy Act. After
that went down, Nixon gave a State of the Union
address January nineteen seventy and in that address, one third
(12:23):
of it was about the environment. Now Earth Day came
and Earth Day was, which it was epics to everybody.
Walter Kronkit covered on it was like the biggest thing,
like or today's Earth Day. Everybody got off from school, people,
every college camp. Yeah, it was the deal, and a
(12:44):
lot of things happened. The music became big out of
that Earth Day. Marvin Gay, Mercy me the ecology, Joni
Mitchell big, you know, Yellow Taxi, Neil Young writing ecological ballads,
a Pete Seeger folk singer working to save the Hudson River.
So musical artists became environmentally significant.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, that late sixties or that seventies genre of Laura
Canyon music.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Of that whole, all those artists. That's when.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Also, I think the magic was happening in Los Angeles.
So interesting that it.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Was they took the environment as a big as you hear,
California was the leader in an environmental stewardship and consciousness.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Welcome back to Table for two.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We've just ordered lunch here at the Tower Bar, and
Doug is telling me all about his new book, Silent
Spring Revolution, the snapshot of the extraordinary people who early
on insisted I'm protecting the earth and its resources. So
let's dive deeper into what inspired Doug to write it. So,
I mean, this book is huge. How long did it
(14:12):
take you to write this and when did you start
to sort of formulate the significance of these particular people.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Well, the great part for me was, unlike when you
deal with the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, they were real environmentalists.
I mean, they're a gold standard. They really prioritized it
less so Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. But they were responsive
and what they responded to was Rachel Carson. She was
like Harriet Beecher, Stowe's uncle Tom's Cabin about slavery, or
(14:44):
there was Upton Saint Clair wrote a book The Jungle,
about dirty meat packing factories in Chicago. Rachel Carson blew
a very loud alarm in Silent Spring that said, we're
destroying the planet. And by our arrogance and our conceits
and by our greed and by our consumerism, run a muck.
We're not regulating things properly, We're not being land and
(15:07):
water stewarts. And so I knew that she would be
the center of my book, and and yet I wanted
to have an ensemble cast. And her relationship with John F.
Kennedy's interesting because if Jack Kennedy did not back her
action she was. He said, I'm gonna put a science panel.
I'm gonna hire the best people, but we're gonna see
(15:29):
whether her book holds up or not, the obvious thing
to do. And the scientist said, oh my god, Rachel
Carson nailed it's that's it's all accurate. And so that
helped you have a president now backing you, a rewriter
like Rachel Carson. And then I noticed Lady Bird Johnson,
(15:50):
a first lady married to Lyndon Johnson. She was a
hardened environmentalist, particularly she was interested in wildflower counts cervation,
but also she was opposed to what they call the
uglies or vulgularization of landscapes. She wanted to make sure
parts of America stay beautiful more in a pristine way.
(16:12):
And she she would travel all over his first lady
and go down the Rio Grande River in a raft,
or you know, go on kayaking in the Snake River
of Idaho, or go up to the redwoods up in Mendocino,
Humboldt County, California. So she was an activist environmental first Lady,
which was helpful because she carried a big celebrities Filowl
(16:34):
Life and yeah, and then Hollywood. You know, I write
in the book that Walt Disney was a Republican, but
he was an unusual Republican that he had that in
the sense that his big love was critters, like if
he lived all animals, like when he lived here in California.
You know, other people might complain about deer in their backyard,
(16:56):
bamby in their backyard, or what he never did. And
he saw the potential animation of watching these animals up
close their habits, their movements, and so he did a
group of films called Disney True Adventures, which would run
and it had a profound effect because he would show
the life of a coyote, and up until Disney, people
(17:18):
all over America put cyanide to poison the coyotes because
they were considered a vermin and an enemy to the
ranchers to cast sheep, and Disney makes them cuddly pops
living with mom rolling down a hill, you know. So
there became in the sixties, We've got to save this
Noah's arc of species. That how we're lucky we can
(17:39):
still do it. We can save the manatee in Florida,
or with Florida panther, we can save a condor in Arizona, or.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
The Big Big Deal.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Very and your friendships with Sean Penn and George Clooney
and Brad pitt to you know, tell us about those relationship.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
I'm very close with Sean. Sean Penn is a good
friend of mine and I'm always proud of him, and
I tell him I'm proud of him. I'm proud that
he beyond being this extraordinary actor, who could you know,
do milk or Mystic River and his resume is so long.
The other side of him, which is an activist side.
When I was in New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina, he'd
(18:24):
go down to film in New Orleans and lot Sean.
In fact, he has tattooed on his side NOLA, New Orleans,
you know, Louisiana on his arm.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
He wrote a book based on your experience with Sean
about Katrina. And it also comes up as a question
to me, like why was that not the moment that
everyone just said, okay, this.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Is that should have been But okay, and we were
living I was living in Katrina through Katrina, stayed in
at Tulane and Sean came in. I evacuated after it,
and he came in and we insinuated ourselves past roads, blocks,
a police you know, and we were in the dark
in city. We stayed together in this I knew one
(19:02):
home of a guy who had a generator, and so
Shawn and I would stay there. And then Matt Tyabe,
a writer from Rolling Stone, was around for a while.
But we would get a boat through Nick Robertson of CNN,
and I was able to procure little boats, so we
would go out and do rescue missions and you know,
it was amazing to me because Shawn got on the
boat and hop in and but some of these people
(19:24):
lost everything. They're in water. They're sitting on a front
porch stoop with water surrounding them, and suddenly they would
look up and say.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Sean Penn, I saw you and.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
You said that right, and you're talking about about Shawn's
movies while your.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Wife is gone down.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
But we would bring people up to Saint Charles Avenue
and then to a Turo hospital. And you know, he's
a natural leader, Sean, and he has a great leadership.
He could have been colonel or a captain in army
completely because he's able to mobilize people and move he
does logistics surprisingly well. And so after that we just
(20:08):
started doing different things. So I wrote a portrait of
Sean and a long profile for Vanity Fair and Haiti.
It was only one of my visits to Haiti, but
I visited Sewn a bunch of times down there, helping
doing what I could do as a writer, but also
by profiling Sean and Vanity Fair about what he was
doing in Haiti, bringing consciousness to it. And I'm collect
(20:31):
friends through Sean like that. There's a General Ken Keene,
who was the head of the Southern Command in Haiti.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And I was with Sean.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
It was this, you know, strange Haitian knight, importer of Prince.
And Sean's smoking his cigarette and we went together to
go meet the general running the thing and Sean puts
his cigarette behind his back like like that. The general
doesn't see it, and he goes. He goes, Sean smoke,
that's a perfectly good cigarette and it should not go
to waste, and started smoking in and they got along
(21:03):
really well. And here I watched Sean in bed with
the military in a way that was really interesting and helpful.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
It seems like that's unique, like that you throw yourself
into it right at the front lines.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
What motivates maybe both Sean and I are frustrated. We
want to be and we want to be like combat
reporters like we want to be We want to be
like Ernest Hemingway or Stephen Crane.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
And do you ever get scared when you're in those.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
You know, because I really take care of myself, you know,
I do, But I'm so cautious. Like when I was
in Haiti, everybody else was telling me, like somebody got
sick from a shower, you know, from the water, wondering
about and so I was like, I like I do it.
I was like doing bottled water spongebag. And I wasn't risky,
you know. I saw others like, oh it was only
(22:00):
one person. It's like ones enough, man, I ain't going.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
In that shower.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
So I have preservation strategies. I'm not quite brave good,
but yeah, but you know, we we've had fun and
got many other places. I went with Sean and Christopher
Hitchens to Venezuela and we traveled all over there. We interviewed,
you go Chabas there. I've been with Sean to Cuba
and we would go, so it became part of a routine.
(22:30):
But more than that, I just he's just such a
warm heart and wonderful person. Sean. When you get to
really know him, he's a manch and a beautiful friend
and never forgets me and includes me and things. You know,
here I am teaching at Rice University, and if he
hears I'm coming out here and he's doing some big gala,
he'll just like suddenly plug me in, you know, Like
(22:51):
I'm like I'm at the eight table, and it's like well,
you've earned a seat technically.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And Sean, I had the you know, when Shawn was
really pushing the vaccinations here in Los Angeles. I had
a real incredible afternoon with him where I met him
in Brentwood and I drove in his pickup truck and
I really saw him in action, just as he's smoking
a cigarettes and.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We're driving a Dodger stadium.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And then I, you know, watched him have the meeting
with the team and then go to the field and
really see what was happening, and then go back and
sort of hear his regroup, and I really at one
point just looked at the you know, to my left
in the car and there Sean is all, you know,
weathered and tan and smoking, and I just I just knew.
(23:34):
I this was such a significant moment of watching an
incredible individual make change, which keep going back to individuals
can do things. Thank you for joining us on Table
(24:05):
for two. Doug is not only an award winning author,
but he's also a distinguished historian and has an eye
not only on the past, but on what's happening today too.
I'm curious how Doug thinks we will look back at
this unprecedented moment in history.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
All of us have had the good.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Fortune now to see with these telescopes that are now
showing us what's out there. And then you also remember
the finite time we're on this planet, from conception to grave.
And it astounds me that we don't.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Make the right choices and we're in this war with
each other.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
When these companies make a lot of money, the economic divide,
it gets me nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
And so you feel there's hope.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I have to because I teach young people, and so
you know, Witty gut Thrie used to talk about, I'm
a hope machine, and I try to is that like,
I've got to promote hope. And I also learned from
the people I wrote about the book Environmentalist of the
sixties that got it results. You got to make it fun.
A lot of students are very worried about climate change,
(25:12):
as they should be. The bad news is some of
them are freaking out about it, saying, my god, the
planet is doomed. Everything it's lost. And so you try
to say, don't get sick, you know, stay psychologically healthy,
stay physically healthy, and let's get you going on a project.
And it may not be getting off of fossil fuels.
(25:33):
It might be a smaller thing of protecting a local
by you or saving an open story. Small, start, small,
and get it's the taste of victory. Win some local
environmental issue, stop a project that's going to be detrimental
to an estuary or a butterfly habitat, whatever you choose,
(25:54):
and then you'll meet people. You'll network with people, and
that network just has to grow. But it's not going
to There is a spiritual side to the natural world,
and we're going to need all hands on deck to
save the planet. If you can find somebody that's angry
about this, this one percent of corporate greed and extraction industry,
(26:17):
you know, monsters that are just ravaging the planet and
they don't care. You're gonna have to find a very
big alliance of David's to take on that goliath.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
And so it's great to.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Hear you say from your perspective to find the hope
and keep it and lean into like the small, the
small winds, because the small winds are going to get us.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
The good news about the generation Z, the young people
of today, I think they see the electric car for
whatever Tesla and other companies are, they see it's doable.
This is the ni first generation that's growing up that
knows somebody that has an electric car. You know, they
may not be able to afford it, they don't have
it themselves, but they're saying I can that that's gonna happen.
(27:01):
And I think that gives them a little extra impetus
this generation right now that we can maybe do this.
It might be you know, Bob Dylan has a song
called up to Me which was left off of Blood
on the Tracks, but it's on one of his bootlegs.
But you know, Dylan says, you know, nobody else is
singing the song I want to hear, so I guess
it's up to me.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Yeah, And you know or that Michael Jackson facing the
mirror kind of thing. But you know, you got to
sometimes say, look, it's about me. I'm going to do
what I can do without getting sick, without being psychologically
a basket case. I'm going to live a healthy life.
But I'm going to prioritize environmental stewardship any way I can,
and I'm willing to do small victories with my eye
(27:42):
on them on the big one.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Do you think there'll be a time that you the
historian looks back on this time.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
The people that will be live looking back up this time,
we'll look at it and be like, how will they
perceive this time?
Speaker 3 (28:05):
I think there'll be a narrative about in the nineteen
fifties with the discovery of DNA, human makeup, of our makeup,
and the same time the computer chip came, you know,
microchip and Texas instruments. And at the same time we
started aiming for the moon with technology, using our missile
(28:26):
war capacity in n NASA to do a moonshot. And
there became technology became the god. People like all this.
Huxley warned about this and Brave New World. You know,
in Huxley's book, you would bless yourself with the tea
of the Model T, but now you would bless yourself
with the tea of technology. And there's a race going
(28:49):
on between the people that don't care what it's happening things.
Technology will fix it. Well, so what if there's wild
buyers here? Technology will figure it out. So it's a
lot of people are praying at the ultra of technology
and that has benefits. Look, when I get sick and
I'm going to a hospital, I'm so glad of new
(29:10):
heart open heart surgery technology. I thank you God for
that technology. And sometimes, you know, when I'm lost and
I can go on GPS, I'm like, thank God for GP.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Can you say to yourself, oh my God, how did
I used to do that?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
We all understand it, but we also need to be
suspicious to take a take a paceback. That's what Rachel
Carson was telling people. You're just praying this DDT all over.
It's killing people. Caesar Chabez started the Mexican American Movement
with pesticides. Keg let's ye know. I mean, let's take
a break here, let's see what's going on. Let's get
(29:48):
more data before we move. And we opened up the
wild West of social media with no data. We just
open open the door.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Everyone just ran it.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
As a historian, in your view, is it your job
to be unbiased, an unbiased reporter, or is it to
be an evaluator of the past who is not unbiased,
but who is responsible for highlighting the important themes and
(30:20):
ideas for the rest of us in building a morality
out of it.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
I've learned to have two hats. One is I try
to be just like if you went to a doctor
you're just doing your diagnosis, or a judge in a
law case, historians trying to a judge or try to
say this is what happened. But on the environment, when
you see the planet being destroyed, I feel I have
a moral obligation, which is ahead of my professional obligation,
(30:46):
to raise whatever alarm bells I can to say that
we are going to have to find a new wave.
We're going to have to have a new silent spring
revolution where people from all walks of life set enough
we're done with fossil fuels. And I know it's global
and it's difficult. I don't believe China's going to help us.
(31:08):
I'm good friends with John Carey. He was trying hard
to do diplomacy with China on climate. It's almost impossible
India polluting. But we can start it here at home.
We can start it in California and let it grow,
and eventually the United States has shown to be such
a dominant country, maybe we are the country that shows
(31:28):
the world that we're done with fossil fuels, that it's
an antiquated form.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Of Yeah, we're going to have to take the lead.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
We're gonna have to be the league. And that's just it,
and it's hard, but it can grow with the movement
has to grow. I wrote in this book, it's not
just Rachel Carson, a scientist, author, or William O. Douglas
Supreme Court justice. But there were Republicans, there were filmmakers,
they're actors, they're artists. We all pitch in school teachers
(31:56):
on Earth Day teaching it. I mean, everybody today knows
what ecology is. I mean that that was a moment.
So this generation, the Baby Boom generation that gets, you know,
criticized a lot actually on the environment. At least created
sustainable ideas for are we do with air water quality,
(32:17):
sewage treatment plants, saved some species that were going extinct
with you know, we moved the bar forward. But since
then it's been in what happened with after the Endangered
Species Act passed in nineteen seventy three, that passed the
Senate ninety two to nothing, very progressive legislation to say wildlife.
(32:39):
That same year they had the Arab oil embargo and
the OPEC countries said, what you know, the Arab countries
united and did price gouging on us and the American
people like recently or complaining about high gasoline at the
pump's inflation. Why aren't we energy independent? And you started
(33:00):
getting the oil gas lobby organizing in a way with
the extraction industries of all kinds, chemical industries to form
a counter punch to the environmentalists. The good news was
the environmental movement got a win win, win win in
the sixties and seventies. It made a difference, But then
they got muted because of the power of money of
(33:21):
these oil and gas people shut it down.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
As our lunch comes to a close, I'm comforted by
Doug's optimism that if we act now, we can still
turn things around.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
But when the stakes are so high, what actions can
we take to protect the future. So, Doug, you know
you do have hope, which is so good to hear.
What can the individual do? What can I do to
help this alone?
Speaker 3 (33:56):
I think if you have the economic means it could
up to transfer to an electric car, do it. If
you can make less of a carbon footprint, do it.
But look, we're busy. Not everybody's keeping tabs of their
carbon footprint, nor can they, And I don't want people
should You can't shame people. We shouldn't be shaming people
(34:18):
on the environment. Look, it's a big mess going on there,
So find something that you like. I like to tell
students the great book by Henry David Thureau Walden's Pond
and he fell in Love with the Pond. And you
read Walden and I would ask people, what's your Walden?
If I ask Bruce, what's the place that you've been
in all your travels that you just love that speaks
(34:40):
to you in the natural world, be a custodian of
that place. Put your heart there and say, I just love,
for whatever reason, the Great Basin National Park in Nevada,
or I just love the big sur coastline. Take the time,
join a friends group there, talk to other people that
love that place, and you'll become a watch dog for
a particular area that we need to hold those heirlooms
(35:04):
down while all of this is in transition right now.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Be a custodian of the place you love. Protect It's
like being taking care of your home, your family. Be
that custodian.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, you know when Doctor Seuss and the Lorax, you
know I speak for the trees. You need to speak
for that one area that meant a lot to you.
I love the Hudson River of the valley. So I'm
working with Sina cuts in and get up and what
can we do to make the river clean or just
one because I like all rivers, but I can be overwhelmed.
And don't beat up on it, don't punish ourselves. Just
(35:37):
be positive, full of love and find a place you
love and work to protect it.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, and I feel like you know the Giving Tree
that book, you know, at the end of the book
when it's just a stump and he says, I have
nothing more to give. There's such a powerful lesson in
that for us today. Absolutely, I don't know where on
the tree we're at.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Hopefully we're at the stump.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, we're not at the stump. That's the good news.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's the glass happened.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
At the stump. It where I'm looking at that stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
We're getting close in the stump.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
I used to be the literary executor. I am of
Hunter Thompson's estate, the wild Guy and all my and
everybody thinks that drugs and alcohol and Hunter is interesting.
The part I liked of Hunter was I went with him.
He was in Whitty Creek, Colorado, and joined the local
Witty Creek council meeting. It's all these like just local people,
and there's Hunter with this, and he would do all
(36:32):
the little things that we're not gonna let the gravel
pit on the road, We're not gonna do it, because
he loved that area and he you know, know that's
an Elk range, You're not going to do it. And
you know, he just did his little part and that
made me see him as a citizen. You know, that's
a calling, that's a citizen. It's really important in out
here what you do. Bruce, and or just an actor
(36:53):
like Leonardo DiCaprio, what he's been doing with ocean awareness.
I've gotten to watch up close, and it's he makes
a difference. He can when he goes to Washington talks
people wake up. John Carey was once tried to ask
me to get Leonardo to come to a big ocean summit.
I was like, I'm not going to get him. But
I went and wrote an email to Michael Metovoy and
(37:15):
Metal Boy his friends. But you know, one thing happened
or another and Leo said, I guess I need to
be there for this, and he said yep. So he
showed up and not only did he give an incredible speech,
but Leo gave him like a million dollar check on
the spot. You know, it's amazing, and you know, so
a lot of the people in the Hollywood community. You
should see yourself as the energizing force for the new
(37:39):
environmental movement that you've got a lot of cloud power
and media access and so use it to combat climate change.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Well, everyone should read this book because I always feel
like you have to understand the foundation to go to
the next level of it. And you know, you can't
just take an amazing photograph. You have to learn the process.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yes, and we've lost the way so to get back there.
This book is an amazing book. It should be talking.
Speaker 3 (38:07):
That's when I wanted to. I think if you read it,
you'll say, up optimistically, we can do this. Now, we
got a big burn, but we can do it. They
took on these challenges. I mean, the bald eagle was
almost extinct. There handfuls left. I remember, we brought it back.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
And you know, we can do a lot.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
A Lake Gary was dead and it's now alive. Kyahga
River on fire. Now it's a national park. We can
do things, and so be hopeful. Read this as like
a road map to twenty first century new environmental wave
waiting for It's been.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
A pleasure having lunch with you, and thank you everyone
for pulling up a chair today.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
And what they didn't see is that I, unfortunately I
went with the pizza and left my kill salad it
to wilt in front of me.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, but you right off the bat well. Thank you, Doug.
I appreciate your time. I appreciate lunch.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Thank you so much. Bruce.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Table for Two with Bruce Bosi is produced by iHeartRadio
seven three seven Park and airmyl Our. Executive producers are
Bruce Bosi and Nathan King. Table for Two is researched
and written by Bridget arsenalt Our sound engineers are Paul
Bowman and Alyssa Midcalf.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Table for two's la production team is Danielle Romo and
Lorraine viz Our.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Music supervisor is Randall poster Our talent booking is by
James Harkin. Special thanks to Amy Sugarman, Uni Cher, Kevin Yuvane,
Bobby Bauer, Alison Kanter Raber, Barbara and Jen and Jeff
Klein and the staff at the Tower Bar in the
world famous Sunset Tower Hotel. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
(39:52):
to your favorite shows.
Host
Bruce Bozzi
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