Humanity's Blind Spots | Olivia Lazard

Entangled World

Watch the video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IsZaVuRktXY

My guest today is Olivia Lazard. Olivia is a research fellow at Carnegie Europe where her research involves investigating how to support a move towards regenerative foreign and security policy within the European Union. She also leads projects at the University of Exeter on the ecological costs of the energy transition. Essentially, Olivia works on the geopolitics of climate-disrupted futures and ecological breakdown. With a background in conflict resolution, and deep field experience in some of the world's most fragile contexts, she now focuses on preventing and mitigating the risks associated with a global competition over specific renewable and non-renewable resources. Her work tackles the decarbonisation-regeneration nexus, the core pillar for the future of global security and peace.

In this conversation, Olivia and I discuss the major “blind spots” of the energy transition and how competitive resource extraction is likely to lead to conflict, violence, ecological destabilization, and the dangerous potential of simultaneously compromising multiple major ecosystems for the sake of resource extraction. She describes how COVID and the Ukraine War revealed some important vulnerabilities in our interconnected systems and how resources can be powerfully weaponized by those who control them. She puts the Ukraine-Russia conflict in context as part of a larger story that has major implications for the future; a possible future in which Russia may be able to use its control over energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and other natural resources to threaten the stability of other increasingly dependent, destabilized nations.

We also talk about how China has perfected the verticalization of supply chains for several critical minerals needed for the advanced tech revolution, particularly the development of AI. China has become not only an industrial heavyweight leading in manufacturing but also a technological heavyweight, which has massive geopolitical implications for the global balance of power

We explore the rationality behind different realms of human conquest throughout history, from colonialism to the nuclear age, highlighting how these revolutions came about in response to needs and threats in key historical moments. We discuss historical cycles of attempts to control, extract, expand, and conquer, and the resulting long-term consequences. In other words, how our current problem-solving approaches works to solve narrow goals while externalizing harm in other places.

Olivia shares about her experience staying with an Indigenous community in the Amazon during which she had a profound spiritual experience in which she felt more connected to the natural world than she had ever felt before and it completely shifted how she thought about her place in the world. We end the conversation talking about how in reality, we are not separate from nature and to understand that is to come to view ourselves and the world in all its holistic beauty.

Olivia Lazard’s Links & Resources:

https://carnegieendowment.org/people/olivia-lazard?lang=en

The Blind Spots of the Green Energy Transition | Olivia Lazard | TED

https://www.iwm.at/europes-futures/fellow/olivia-lazard

https://x.com/OliviaLazard?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://muckrack.com/olivia-lazard/articles

Other Resources Mentioned:

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery

The Human Planet: How We Created The Anthropocene by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin

Stockholm Impact Week (Olivia’s talk and others)

Benchmark Minerals

James Dyke (tipping points research and more)

International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Emily Robinson, PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Exeter

The European Green Deal

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