Gaia Vince is an award-winning science journalist, author and broadcaster particularly interested in the interaction between human systems and Earth’s planetary systems.
1. You have a PhD in protein crystallography. How easy was it breaking into journalism after research? What was your route in?
I wrote articles for the student newspaper London Student while I was an undergraduate, and did reviews for Time Out and other places. Eventually, after I stopped doing science, I wrote about it or made radio programmes about it.
2. You left an enviable job to go travelling through some of the most amazing and fragile parts of the world with your partner. That journey lasted two and a half years and was the basis of your first award-winning book, ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene’—a brave decision calling for oodles of confidence. What prompted you to do it?
I was the news editor at Nature, and I noticed increasing numbers of papers reporting dramatic changes to our planet: atmospheric warming, nitrification of waterways, acidification of oceans, biodiversity loss, invasive species, erosion changes, hydrology alteration, zoonotic diseases in humans… and I realised that they all had something fundamental in common: us. We were causing planetary-scale changes, and also being affected by these self-made changes. I recognised that this was an extraordinary time in humanity’s history and also in geological history — we were entering a human-dominated age, the Anthropocene. I wanted to explore this time and its implications for us — especially those first impacted around the world. And I couldn’t do that from my office in London. So, I left my job, rented out my place in London, and bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu.
3. I guess you both had the time of your lives. How did you prepare for the trip? And how did you pay for it?
Initially, I set out to see if I could make it work for 6 months, selling articles and radio packages as I went. I had to earn for both of us, although my partner was able to sell some of his photographs to accompany my articles. Sometimes, I would go off alone on reporting jobs or research. We lived frugally and travelled slowly, paycheck to paycheck.
4. Were there any places you visited that made you think you wanted to come back and stay?
Plenty! Costa Rica — and in fact, we did return there to live for 4 months with our kids while I made a documentary series for television.
5. Pick one moment in which your heart raced from sheer terror…
There was a very hairy time on the nomadic lands around the Ethiopian-Kenyan border when we were accidentally mixed up in an intertribal conflict and ended up fleeing gunshots in a vehicle driven by a Colombian priest for days. There were several times during those days when I genuinely feared I would die either by being shot, by thirst, or by heatstroke.
6. Your second book, ‘Transcendence’, seems a slight departure from the theme of the perils of anthropogenic climate change. Is there a common thread running through your three books?
My first book describes how we are changing the world and what that means for us. My second book, ‘Transcendence’ is about how we got to this point; how a smart ape became a planet-altering force of nature. The common thread throughout my books and most of my work is a systems perspective — I am interested in how human systems interact with earth systems, in the complexity of these interactions, and in the juxtaposition between the micro (individual) level effect and the macro (planetary scale). And the other common thread running through all my work is energy. All systems are limited by energy constraints, but what makes us so extraordinary is that we have developed the ability to harness increasing amounts of external energy.
7. In your critically acclaimed new book, ‘Nomad Century’, you convincingly make the case that global warming will drive billions of people north in search of new homes. How did you go about researching it, how much new reporting did you have to do and how long did it take?
I’ve been researching this in different ways since 2009, so I guess a decade!
8. The flows of people you describe are unlike anything in living memory. Within two or three decades, you argue some countries may receive migrants in numbers that are tens or hundreds of times higher than current levels. In that context, drawing any concrete lessons from recent efforts to settle refugees, for example, is difficult. History might be a better guide and the message there seems to be grim. You mention, for example, the Yamnaya, who colonised Europe 5,000 years ago, wiping out 90% of the original gene pool, “including all of the men in what is now Spain and Portugal”. Why aren’t people right to conclude that the answer is to build bigger walls, beef up security, and toughen up laws?
Walls and barriers have little effect on refugee flows because people are desperate. Barriers simply make migratory flows more dangerous and deadly. Human migration is inevitable and already underway, even if the numbers we expect to see are not certain — it depends on many factors that we can influence, such as how hot we allow places to get owing to our greenhouse gas emissions, to what degree we adapt the most vulnerable places and agricultural practices, and how much we assist those most affected by extreme conditions to move. Many of the places where people live today will not be safe in the coming decades. We must be pragmatic and honest about what this means and find ways to make it work for all of us. The alternative is increasing misery, conflict, and death.
9. Writers don’t often get the chance to respond to their critics. So how would you answer the following points: Open borders are popular with neoliberal thinkers, who value economics but dismiss concerns regarding housing, welfare, and healthcare, as well as deeply-held cultural or religious beliefs which new arrivals may not respect. Your proposal, for example, that settling migrants could require the “compulsory purchase” of land from existing nation-states is elitist and undemocratic…
Open borders are one potential solution, and that doesn’t have to mean no borders, or no control. We already have open borders culturally in the form of the internet and our wealth of shared creations across media, music, technology and so on. We also trade widely in foods, goods, commodities, money, and other resources. I don’t see human movement across borders as being any different, and the economic arguments for it are very strong. Population is increasing globally, and migration will increase populations locally, particularly in cities with stronger economies, which means governments must plan for this with policies around housing, healthcare, and education provision. Many are failing to do so for their existing citizens, never mind additional ones, which is poor policy — blaming policy failures on migrants is the usual recourse of populism, but that can only ever be a temporary -and divisive- solution because the economic realities become clear in time. Large scale migration requires initial investment, both financially and socially, but this investment is more than repaid in the benefits that migration brings. It’s also worth remembering that migration is happening; some of it is economically essential to receiving countries, and so rather than burying our heads in the sand and pretending there is a way to stop it, we should be pragmatic about finding ways to make it work to everyone’s benefit.
Author-
Ananyo Bhattacharya is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in protein crystallography from Imperial College London.
Editor– Roopsha Sengupta
Cover image- iStock
