Are we doomed?

It's heartening, at any rate, to know that you have access to people like Gates, and that he was willing to listen. Our current administration has not shown itself to be particularly willing to listen -- especially to scientists, who often carry the most urgent news. Can we hope to develop a better relationship between science and policy?

We have to be able to do what you say. One way to think of it is to ask ourselves what science means. Science is simply accurate knowledge of the real world. It's not laboratory experiments, not always. Like tsunamis. You don't do laboratory experiments on tsunamis, but if you want to deal successfully in the world you have to have accurate knowledge of the real world; that's what science is. So if you don't have a straight pipeline from knowledge of the world to fixing the world you are doomed to failure.

I would think we're doomed to failure, then, given how politics work in this country. Between the science and the policy there's this ineradicable layer of money and lobbying.

I can easily become pessimistic, just as you say, but in the balance I can find reasons for optimism as well. If you look at our track record in the United States for the last 40 years, yes, there have been some bad outcomes, but there have also been some good outcomes. One example is air quality. Here I sit in L.A., the city that is a metaphor for bad air, and the fact is that air quality in the United States in general and in California in particular has actually improved. The levels of bad air quality indicators have decreased by about 30 percent, even though the population of the United States increased and the number of cars has increased greatly. So air quality is a success story.

Other success stories involve forestry policy and fishing policy. Again, one can think of bad news. But an example of good news is that the biggest forestry products wholesaler in the world, Home Depot, several years ago decided in their own self-interest to phase out buying wood products from old-growth forests and unsustainably managed forests and switch to getting their wood products from sustainably managed forests. So that's encouraging. And the Alaskan wild salmon fishery is sustainably managed. And soon what's called the West Coast pollock fishery -- that's the white fish that ends up in McDonald's fish sticks -- is also going to be accredited for sustainable management.

These examples seem to underscore the importance of trying to work with big business, a notion that I think strikes many environmentalists as alien, if not offensive.

That's right. If you don't work with business, you are certain to be doomed to failure, because businesses along with governments are the most potent forces in the world today. Also, it's important to understand why some businesses make messes and some businesses don't make messes, and insofar as the laws of society itself produce those different outcomes, it's the responsibility of the public to pass laws, buy products and boycott products that will encourage businesses to behave better.

Is there an environmental award that is given to businesses that do well? Is Home Depot being recognized for what it's done?

They're recognized within the World Wildlife Fund, on whose board I sit. I don't know if the general public has an appreciation for what Home Depot is doing. The general public certainly does not have wide sympathy for what the oil companies are doing. And partly that's the result of history. And there still are oil spills; there's been a bad oil spill within the last two weeks. But you have to read the newspaper carefully. That oil spill was not a tanker belonging to ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil; it was a tanker belonging to a private oil carrier, and it's the private carriers that are still using the single-hull tankers and are adhering to low standards. So they give the oil industry a bad name. I'm not saying that the oil industry is a saint; there are still big problems with oil industries operating in dictatorial countries, but the public should also understand the very high standards to which some oil companies are adhering.

Like Chevron.

Like Chevron in Papua New Guinea. Now I can't swear that Chevron is being clean everywhere in the world, but I've talked with lots of Chevron employees who told me about how Chevron operates, for example, in Bahrain and Dubai and Kuwait, and it sounds, from what I'm told, that their standards there are as high as their standards in Papua New Guinea.

So do governments recognize these high standards and reward companies that adhere to high standards?

There are governments that do recognize high standards, and an example of that is what happened in Norway roughly 10 years ago. The Norwegian population as a whole and the Norwegian government in particular are extremely environmentally conscious, and they're also sitting on top of these valuable oil and gas fields in the North Sea, where they were going to sell the leases for oil developments. A number of companies made bids. Chevron was one of the companies that made bids. And I'm told that Chevron's bid financially was not better than the bids of some of the other companies, but the Norwegian government nevertheless awarded the lease to Chevron. And the reason is that the Norwegian government knew very well how rigorously Chevron had been managing its oil field in Papua New Guinea and some other places.

But what about the U.S. government?

Our current government, I think it would be fair to say, is not interested in these accomplishments.

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