"We each eat a credit card amount of microplastics every week"

Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)

"We each at a credit card amount of microplastics every week" is episode 9 in the new GCSP Podcast Series. Dr Paul Vallet interviews Mr Alexander Verbeeek, climate and environment expert and Associate Fellow with the GCSP's Global Fellowship Initiative Dr Paul Vallet: Welcome to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy weekly podcast. I'm your host, Dr Paul Vallet, Associate Fellow with the GCSP Global Fellowship Initiative. For the next few weeks, I'm talking with subject matter experts explain issues of peace, security, and international cooperation. Thanks for tuning in. This past week, we marked Earth Day and the US President Joe Biden convened the virtual summit of 40 leaders to underscore the renewed participation of the United States in international environmental and climate change negotiations. The environment is a global cause that historically has been marked both by raising awareness and concrete action. To discuss this, I'm joined today by Mr. Alexander Verbeek. As well as being an Associate Fellow in the GCSP Global Fellowship Initiative. He led the virtual journey in Addressing Challenges in Global Health Security earlier this month. Alexander for bake is a Dutch environmentalist, writer, public speaker, diplomat, and former strategic policy advisor at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1992 to 2016. Over the past 30 years, he has worked on international security, humanitarian and geopolitical risk issues and the linkage to the years accelerating environmental crisis. Currently, Alexander is writer-editor of the planet, a newsletter about threats to our environment, as well as the beauty of nature. He is Policy Director of the Environment and Development Resource Center in Brussels, and also an independent advisor on climate security, water, food, energy and resources for governments, businesses, think tanks and civil society agencies. Alexander founded the Institute for Planetary Security and developed the Planetary Security Initiative, leading the team that prepared the first planetary security conference in the Hague’s Peace Palace in November of 2015. He is a world Fellow at Yale University and has been a fellow and associate of the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Stockholm International water Institute, a visiting fellow at Uppsala University, and on the board of advisors of several international environmental initiatives with an online following on all social media of more than 400,000. We're fortunate to have him with us despite his busy schedule. Welcome to the podcast. Alexander. Mr Alexander Verbeek: Thank you. Dr Paul Vallet: My first question to you relating to indeed this activity, as a great communicator for all things, environmental, I was going to ask you, if I could, you know, use quotation marks around the term influencing and we talked about this before, but I wanted to ask you whether influencing represents for you a new form of international advocacy for the environment. Mr Alexander Verbeek: I don't think it's new. I think environmentalism has always been about influencing. So, you should start with the first environmentalist, but John Muir is the first name that that comes up because… I wrote about it a couple of days ago. I mean, if you look at John Muir, we talked them about, you know, late 19th century, activism to preserve the environment. So, you know, he couldn't send out tweets, but he wrote books and poems, and he was writing to the people in Washington to preserve nature. And he actually, well it was actually Teddy Roosevelt's idea. He contacted him to actually go out there in nature together, or think about, let's say, Rachel Carson with Silent Spring, I mean, that was still the days of, you know, book writing for influencing and activism. So, I think the causes may that we fight for may have changed in the methodology, but the basic principle of that you have to influence I think that's still there.