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Melissa Fleming [00:00:00]

I'm so happy to welcome you to this special edition of our podcast. My guest this week is the acclaimed actor and three-time Academy Award nominee Edward Norton. He's a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. He told me the damage to our natural world is keeping him awake at night.

 

Edward Norton [00:00:21]

It's quite heartbreaking. I started diving, you know, when I was 14 in the Caribbean. The change to the reef environments in the Caribbean in my adult lifetime is staggering and really upsetting. Reefs are in just terrible shape. Terrible shape. Bleached, you know, covered in algae. You know what was vibrant and colourful and rich is just, is just denuded. It looks like a burnt forest, or something. It's just not, it's not as alive.

 

Melissa Fleming [00:00:58]

From the United Nations, I'm Melissa Fleming. This is Awake at Night. It's great to have you on our podcast.

 

Edward Norton [00:01:14]

Thanks. Great to be here.

 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:01:15]

You've been on a journey with the United Nations, advocating on the global stage now for biodiversity protection and advocacy. What has your journey been like? I mean, is there any... I'm sure you've done some travel. And is there anything that was especially memorable to you?

 

Edward Norton [00:01:37]

Yeah, yeah, lots. I mean... As with all things, I think the people who really inspire you are people who are working within their own immediate communities, to create improvements in quality of life for the people within their communities. Somehow to me, it's like, you know, we're not ants - we're primates and we don't live in hives. But sometimes I get this happy feeling, that when you get to travel and you meet people in Rwanda who are working on a really local community-based project to restore soil or to, you know, protect certain sections of a forest, or something like that. And then you meet people in Canada and you meet people in Vietnam, or you realise like, it does start to feel like, like the work of a hive, you know, like the work - everybody's doing a little bit in different places to sort of try to cultivate the garden.

At times we get so much dire information about the relentless sort of negative progress toward loss of fisheries, acidification of ocean, carbon loading in the atmosphere, all of it. And it's great as a counter to that - the only thing that gives me kind of optimism and hope is seeing that so many people are working at the same time. The globe and the magnitude of it has all these little gardeners, you know, working at different points. And I think that the collective effort can amount to, will amount to something.

 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:03:32]

And probably you've seen some solutions that could be translated to other places, that work (Yeah) discovered locally.

 

Edward Norton [00:03:41]

It's funny, my father's been involved in conservation work for my whole life.

 

Melissa Fleming [00:03:46]

I was just going to ask you that.

 

Edward Norton [00:03:48]

And I think that I've had, I've been lucky. In some sense I've been a witness to the journey of what were people talking about in the 70s, what we're hearing about in the 80s, what has been the focus, what's been the tactical evolution on all this stuff. And you know, we have to allow ourselves that. While at times we may feel that we're not moving fast enough in terms of implementing a collective will to turn the ship, you know, of our extractive non-sustainable economic framework and we get so much unnerving report about the Antarctic glacier recently, the pace of melt and all these things. We have only really come into a focused awareness, I think, of the degree to which our industrial lives was creating these impacts. Let's call it within the last, you know, 70 something years.

And I don't think you can underestimate the capacity of human ingenuity to come up with solutions at a blistering pace. And if you look at the history of human ingenuity and technological development, you have to have the humility to recognise that we can't always even predict what the radiant impacts and speed of adoption of ideas are going to be once we come up with them.

You know, I go sometimes - I'm a pilot, so I like, I will go into the Air and Space Museum in Washington and there's one room I really love where there's nothing hanging from the ceiling. It's not, it's not one of the sort of sexy rooms of rockets or planes. It's a horseshoe shaped room and around the three walls of it is just a shelf. And at the beginning, on the left is the engine of the Wright Brothers flyer plane that they flew in 1903, at Kitty Hawk, you know. And you just march along the wall, year by year, there's the next aeroplane engine, the next aeroplane engine. And on the far right is the engine of the X-1 that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in. And that's in 1963. So essentially you stand there and you look to your left and here's this thing that wouldn't even power a lawnmower today. And 60 years later, is the supersonic jet that broke the sound barrier. And when you think about what had to happen for that technical evolution to take place in 60 years, it's kind of mind boggling, because once people realised we could fly and they really leaned into it, the accumulated knowledge and speed and innovation is, was just breathtaking, you know?

And you can say the same in information technology.

I mean, we're of an age where, you know, a Texas Instruments calculator was a pretty impressive thing when we were kids. And today we're holding in our hands a device that has more computing power than like the IBM mainframes that ran the NASA launches used to have, you know, and that too has happened in an incredibly short period of time, if you think about the... So, I don't want to say glibly that technology is going to hack us out of this problem, but I also don't underestimate both the power of human ingenuity and then the speed at which emergent phenomenon can be adopted, you know, like so, which is why we shouldn't give up. Like we really shouldn't give up because, because innovation and great ideas, not only, not only can get adopted really quickly, but almost inevitably, they also represent really, really large-scale economic opportunity. Those things give me some hope.

 

Melissa Fleming [00:08:18]

I wonder, though, how you got to this place. Maybe, let's go back to your father. Well, first, you were raised on the East Coast of the United States, in Boston and in Maryland. I wonder how much your family, and particularly your father, played a role in your passion for biodiversity? 

 

 

Edward Norton [00:08:34]

Yeah, my dad was an attorney in the U.S. Attorney's office in the Carter administration, and a litigator, and a Marine veteran, and, you know, he's had a lot of chapters, but in the 80s, he led public policy and litigation at the Wilderness Society, one of the great U.S. conservation NGOs. And that was his passion. He loved the great American tradition of conservation, and he led organizations, founded the Grand Canyon Trust, founded, which is a great regional advocacy organization, the Colorado Plateau, was a founding board member of the Rails to Trails Conservancy. He started the Nature Conservancy's China Country Partnership Program and worked out of Indonesia for TNC for years.

So yeah, I grew up in his worlds of environmental policy and strategy and organization building.

And my grandfather, my mother's father, Jim Rouse, was a famous urban developer and planner who also was a real pioneer of impact finance, helped come up with something called the low income housing tax credit in the mid-80s, and I worked for him in New York doing affordable housing development, which sounds, you know, unrelated to climate, except that there was a lot about, there was a lot about the way that his organization, called Enterprise Community Partners was leveraging finance for affordable housing and building a network of community based partners through which to bring the scaffold(?) down, that has affected my thinking a lot about how conservation should be best implemented, as well. And Enterprise, when I was on the board and involved with it, was a was a leader in bringing greening standards, sustainability standards to affordable housing development and things like the lead standards in the U.S. For sustainable building hadn't really been applied to affordable housing and we brought them over into affordable housing.

So I was pretty steeped all my life in a lot of conservation strategy and thinking from my dad. And but then also, the idea through my grandfather of how you can achieve important social outcomes, progressive outcomes, not just through philanthropy, but through smart, you know, market-based re-engineering of things, which I think is extremely relevant to global conservation today. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:11:30]

What does your family vacations look like? 

 

Edward Norton [00:11:33]

Well, that's it. I mean, my dad, you know, my dad was a backpacker and he got us all scuba diving when we were really young. So, I've been diving on reefs since I was 14 years old, you know, like and being underwater, being in the mountains, being in the forests. And that was, you know, it had a big impact on my interest in all this stuff. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:11:58]

So when you picture those environments, those beautiful natural environments that are all being threatened, what is keeping you awake at night when you think about their future and the future of our planet? 

 

 

Edward Norton [00:12:11]

Well, you know, on a spiritual level, in some sense, when you think about the things you've been privileged to see, and you returned to them and they're in any way, you know, denuded, or listen - it really, when you have kids, it's especially... because you start realising that things you've experienced and seen that in the back of your mind you've thought, I hope, I want to share this with my kids someday, and then you realise that those opportunities are getting degraded, it's quite heartbreaking. You know, even in the time... I started diving, you know, when I was 14 in the Caribbean and the change to the reef environments in the Caribbean in my adult lifetime is staggering and really upsetting. And...

 

Melissa Fleming [00:13:09]

Describe what it looked like. What you... how you can remember it as a 14-year-old and what it looks like the last time you were there - what is the difference.

 

Edward Norton [00:13:16]

Well, anywhere in the shallower parts, you know, the Bahamas or many... just reefs are in just terrible shape, terrible shape, bleached, you know, covered in algae, fish - a fraction of what they were. You know, you see invasive species in there that are causing problems, but mostly the warming trends and the bleaching trends are just, you know - what was vibrant and colourful and rich is just, is just sort of, you know, it's denuded. It looks like a burnt forest or something. It's just not, it's not as alive. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:13:59]

How does that make you feel? 

 

Edward Norton [00:14:01]

Oh, it's horrible. You know, it's so distressing and seems so, so self-defeating. Things like the warming of oceans, especially shallower parts of the oceans, are really, you know, it's wreaking havoc in so many ways on our fisheries, on our reefs. And I think, you know, more expansively - you read about the progressive bleaching events and the die off of a system as big as the Great Barrier Reef. You know, 1,500 miles of the thing, and the notion that something that was almost mythological your whole life, like the Australian Great Barrier Reef is, is effectively, you know, on its last legs, is ... it's almost hard to take in the ramifications and the significance of that. But...

 

Melissa Fleming [00:14:52]

I mean, you mentioned your children. I believe you have two - seven, seven and eleven? (eight and eleven) Eight and eleven. And have you taken them to revisit some of the places that you went to as a child? 

 

Edward Norton [00:15:07]

Yes, somewhat. And some places we've been, you know, were still amazing. They already like being underwater and you know, and we try to get to the places that we know are still good or places we haven't even been. But...

 

Melissa Fleming [00:15:27]

So your family vacations are also in nature? 

 

Edward Norton [00:15:30]

Yes, very much so. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:15:33]

How do you teach them about biodiversity? 

 

Edward Norton [00:15:36]

They're fully indoctrinated. They're, you know, they've really never experienced non-electric cars. Our house is powered by solar and battery backup, and they're pretty conversant with aspects of the energy transformation and things like that. And they know I spend a lot of time working on these types of projects. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:16:04]

To what extent do you feel when you think about your two children and the children you know, do they have a voice and should they? 

 

Edward Norton [00:16:13]

Yeah, I think it's distressing, even shameful when you sort of see adults, I don't know, condescending to, or shaming, attempting to shame a younger generation who are exerting their voices from such a perspective of real concern. You know, to call it strident, or shrill or ... and it's like, oh my God, you have children actually articulating that they feel stressed and concerned about what they perceive correctly to be their own future being deteriorated in terms of opportunity, in terms of health... it's crazy. We obviously need to be thinking about the multi-generational future and what their experience of the world is going to be as opposed to, you know, quarterly shareholder reports. 

 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:17:22]

Exactly. I mean, you go to Kenya a lot, I believe, like the average age across the African continent is 19 these days. 

 

Edward Norton [00:17:31]

So young, yeah. Kenya is a country that's... I want to say it's quadrupled, but it might have even... it's on the path to quintupling its population in the last, just in the last couple of decades. And, you know, in the time I've been going, it's gone from something like 10 million to now over 40 million. And it's an incredibly young, very, very young country. And by the way, one of the things really amazing about Kenya, just to use an example, is this is a country with enough - forget wind and solar - the geothermal energy potential in Kenya should and will make it a net energy exporter, a net exporter of renewable energy. And I've talked to the President there, and, you know, they're not an oil producing country, so all petrol-based energy and transportation is imported with huge.... You know, it's literally a negative drag on GDP, a massive negative drag on GDP for that country.

And so electrification of mobility, electrification of energy in general from the abundant geothermal there, I mean, for a country that's so young and that has so successfully - if you look at telecom in places like East Africa, it totally vaulted over the old analogue systems in, you know, systems like Safaricom, or I would say, far superior service to some we get here in New York City. And I think the potential to have countries that have been, you know, tagged and discounted economically as emerging market, or higher risk for some reason, you know, given all kinds of premium costs within the global economy, heading toward possibly being an energy independent country faster than the U.S. or, you know, a 100% renewables powered country, you know, this is eminently possible and really exciting, I think. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:19:37]

And this is something the Secretary-General is really trying to push - a country like Kenya, drowning in debt, wanting to transition and wanting to be completely renewable powered and to be a source of energy for other parts, not just in Africa, but the rest of the world. And yet it's that economic piece, it's that lack of investment that is slowing it down. It sounds like this is something that you're really passionate about changing. 

 

Edward Norton [00:20:08]

Yeah. Well, I think, we have to get not just local people, but economics ministries - people have got to grasp - and businesses - people have got to grasp that they're going to achieve superior economic outcomes through stewardship of natural systems than they are by degrading them for short term economic benefit, because if we don't do that, it's over. We have to have real clarity that natural degradation actually leads to impoverishment, literal impoverishment, not spiritual impoverishment, not through the loss of nature, not spiritual impoverishment, because, I saw, I was able to see tigers and lions and my children aren't. I'm not saying that's irrelevant. Of course, it stings. But if we don't demonstrate within the economics ministries clearly that we can't accurately call something like GDP growth if what we're doing is hollowing out our natural resource capital, it has to be one. I am more and more convinced every year that we're only going to really right the ship if we win these arguments, not even inside ministries of the environment, but inside the economics. I think that that's where we'll see real shift in the way we, I don't know, run our lives, you know. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:21:40]

It is very compelling. And I'm wondering if you picture - because you are President of the U.S. Board of the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust. Do you have those communities in Kenya in mind when you're making this economic case, too. 

 

 

Edward Norton [00:21:56]

We are working in that area, because we think it's a really significant showcase. Not just because it's a kind of iconic area and because Maasai tribal communities are very iconic, you know, kind of traditional culture, all these things. We don't look at it through that sort of, I don't know, the lens of romance of elephants in front of Kilimanjaro or Maasai people and their traditions. It's very, very different. We look at it from the point of view of here are, you know, land owning pastoralist communities who have the total discretionary control through titled land ownership of what they're going to do with forest and grasslands habitats that have massive national economic significance.

The Maasai communities we work with control over 50% of the Chyulu Forest, which is the watershed for Mombasa, so 20% of Kenya's population is reliant on the watershed from this one forest, and it's owned by title by Maasai communities that could choose to log it, they could choose to do whatever they want. You have about 20% of all of Kenya's wildlife tourism revenue, which is a big part of the GDP, goes into the national parks in that area. And basically, it's a situation where you have pastoralist communities, mostly cattle agriculturalists, like on an economic level, getting more severely impacted year over year by drought cycles.

And you basically have to be able to talk to people and say, listen - there are ways through stewardship to layer up your economic opportunity, just like an investment portfolio through carbon credit offset, you know, preservation of forests, delivering carbon credit, tradeable assets that can be monetised in the global carbon markets, land conservancy leases, watershed tax credits, better revenue from tourism, etc... And basically what the Maasai wilderness conservation effort is, though it sounds esoteric, though it's in a very specific area - what we're really trying to show is that you can finance conservation outcomes in non-philanthropic ways. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:24:29]

Well, sounds like you have a really good sustainable model. But I would like to now turn to your career. You have a stellar career in acting and filmmaking. Did you always want to be an actor? 

 

Edward Norton [00:24:45]

I enjoyed it from a very young age, but I didn't... I didn't make a conscientious decision to pursue it, you know, at a high level until I was in my early 20s. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:25:02]

I read somewhere that you had a babysitter who did act and kind of inspired you at a young age. 

 

Edward Norton [00:25:08]

Yeah. That's why I first started. I first started taking acting classes at, yeah, at around that age. But not, you know, I wasn't... I don't want to say I wasn't a theatre kid - I loved theatre, but I played sports and did this and that, I was... It was a thing I did among lots of other things that I loved, but I didn't, I never really, I wasn't a kid like... Like I, I mean, I like, imagine myself hitting the three-point shot at the buzzer much more than I ever thought about giving an Oscars speech, or something like that, you know. And I - it's probably still true. I think I still, like, you know, I cry like a baby when Leo Messi wins the World Cup finally. And I don't really rate, I guess I would call it, you know - accolades in the arts have always seemed to me a little bit like gilding the lily. And when I was a kid it was the same - I wasn't dreaming of like being a well-known actor, I just really liked doing it. I liked the community of it and I liked... I like the imagination of it and I was always a kid who liked to mimic things. And it's kind of still the way I feel about it. I, I like doing it more than I really like what comes with it. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:26:36]

I mean, you studied history at Yale and you weren't really going in that direction. What was the pivotal moment that changed it? Because soon you were cast in the movie Primal Fear and later on Fight Club. 

 

Edward Norton [00:26:53]

You know, I was actually working in New York, working for my grandfather's affordable housing finance organization. And I was doing theatre - not, I wouldn't say on the side - I was pursuing it, but I didn't... To me like, life in the arts wasn't sort of mutually... I never saw it as something where that's all you do. You know what I mean? And I can't explain it. Some people would say, no, you've got to commit yourself. You gotta be consumed by it. I was fairly consumed by it, but I don't really agree. I was always very inspired by people like Toni Morrison, the great novelist - I remember reading that she, you know, she worked as an editor and was raising three kids and she was writing her first novels, you know, between like 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. And I can't explain it, but even at that age, I sort of thought to myself, you do this, you make the room for this while you also, like, kind of, you know, make a living or pursue other things. And so maybe I'm lucky, but I never saw a creative life as something that cancels out the rest of what you're interested in. 

 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:28:16]

Well, it certainly hasn't with you. I mean, but did you feel at a certain moment that there was a certain passion and that when you were on the stage you felt?

 

Edward Norton [00:28:24]

Oh, yeah, I loved it. I still love it. And I guess I'm, you know, the theatre company I started out with has grown and grown and we've built it here in New York into one of the great companies. I still feel very connected to the community and I love the experience of it, but I don't actually, I don't find like, I'm able to feel inspired or bring anything to it if I don't... Like if I made movies back to back to back year in and year out, I wouldn't have anything... I wouldn't have absorbed anything to bring into it, you know what I mean? It's like, I think you you've got to have some ...you've got to have some life and some experience of the world to bring anything genuinely interesting into that work. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:29:21]

You must be so much in demand. I mean, how do you insist that you need to carve out space for your private life and for your other interests? 

 

Edward Norton [00:29:30]

I'm really lucky. It's just, you know, I sort of get to craft that balance however I want really. Sometimes I'll go stretches, and I don't feel particularly creatively inspired and other times I get these blitzes of feeling consumed by something and it's nice, but the ebbs and flows of that I think are very true to how creative cycles work, you know. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:30:03]

You must also decide, you know, to choose what movie or role you get involved in. (Yes, of course.) Is there one you're particularly proud of? 

 

Edward Norton [00:30:13]

I like most of... I mean, I've been really lucky and have really, really... I've gotten to make a lot of really good films with really good filmmakers. I made some myself, and they all have different chemistries and different pleasures of collaboration with certain people, or a sense of the relevance of what it was about or, you know, the reason that they're pleasurable and can be very different. But I've been really lucky and enjoyed the large majority of the stuff I've gotten to work on over 30 years. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:30:53]

Well, and it seems that the entertainment industry is increasingly incorporating important issues in its content through storytelling. You were involved in Extrapolations, a recent Apple TV climate series. How much of a role can the entertainment industry play in changing people's attitudes? And maybe particularly because you're passionate about this space - how they see our environment and climate. 

 

Edward Norton [00:31:27]  I don't even think you can quantify it. I think the potential is always there and then I think we're seeing people come at this set of topics and themes from really interesting angles, you know? Extrapolations was like the Black Mirror of climate disaster. It's really, really, really deeply rooted in science. And I really liked it. I thought it was a really, really great meditation on these questions directly. I think then things like Don't Look Up are more satirical... 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:32:09]

Does Extrapolations have the danger of making people feel doomed? 

 

Edward Norton [00:32:19]  I don't know if it's... Sometimes, I think sometimes you need a bracing. I think we need a little of that. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:32:27]

We also need hope, though. I mean, I wonder if you look into the future and can you imagine - I know you're working really hard to get to a place of conservation and of the return of the beauty of our natural world. Are you hopeful now about the future of our planet and the future of the Earth that your children are going to be living on? 

 

 

Edward Norton [00:32:55]

I think our kids are going to experience, unfortunately, some very... I think some things are going to be very, very, very altered from the way they were when when we were kids. I think there's going to be a very different baseline, in some ways that to me are sad, but I think you have to have some humility, in terms of even when things look dire. And when we're getting, you know, flashing, blaring, warning, you know, signals. Couple of things - one is: these systems are incredibly complex, so there's always going to be more learning and more understanding. But, I also do think and I hope this isn't Pollyanna-ish, or you know, wishful thinking, but I do think we've got, you know, human ingenuity is rather amazing. And I'm, you know, I'm banking on that - the capacity of our collective ingenuity To come up with things that we can't even really imagine right now. You know what I mean? 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:34:22]

Yeah. And our collective love of the beauty of our planet. Thank you so much, Edward, for joining me. 

 

Edward Norton [00:34:30]

Pleasure. 

 

Melissa Fleming [00:34:33]

Thank you for listening to Awake at Night. We'll be back soon with more incredible and inspiring stories from people working against huge challenges to make this world a better and safer place.

To find out more about the series and the extraordinary people featured, do visit un.org/awake-at-night. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please take the time to review us. It helps more people to find the show.

Thanks to my editor Bethany Bell, to Adam Paylor, Josie Le Blond, and my colleagues at the UN: Katerina Kitidi, Roberta Politi, Geneva Damayanti, Tulin Battikhi, Bissera Kostova, Anzhelika Devis, and Carlos Macias. The original music for this podcast was written and performed by Nadine Shah and produced by Ben Hillier. Additional music was by Pascal Wyse.