Adam Ruins Everything (2015) s03e04 Episode Script

1 (MAN GRUNTING) Look around, Birch.
You've made it.
Mount Everest.
(GRUNTING) How foolish the fellows back home in the urban hiking club will feel when you regale them with this adventure.
Forget their tawdry walks through the city park.
(LAUGHING, SHOUTING) (SIGHS) This this is real nature.
No people, no cities.
Just pure, untrammeled wilderness.
(LAUGHS) Mother Nature doesn't get any more natural than this! Actually, your idea of what counts as nature is all wrong.
(SCREAMING) Talk about a cold open.
Hi, I'm Adam Conover, and this is "Adam Ruins Everything.
" Closed Captions Provided by truTV So, you said your name's Birch? Is that a nickname or Pull me up! Pull me up! Of course.
Sorry.
(GRUNTING) Thank you.
(SIGHING) Now, if you will excuse me, I will be continuing my Everest summit solo.
I came up here to get away from people.
Hate to break it to you, but Everest is actually way too full of people.
And this avalanche of tourists is turning this majestic mountain into a depressing dump.
(SCOFFS) I'm no tourist.
I'm on a spiritual journey.
Summitting Mount Everest is the pinnacle of human achievement.
Sure, it was, the first time.
When mountaineers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary summited Mount Everest in 1953, it was a feat never before achieved by humankind.
Huzzah, we've done it! And now, no one else ever has to do it again.
(ADAM) But today, budget tour companies help over 100,000 amateurs climb Everest every year.
Unh! (CAMERA CLICKS) Ha-ha, crushing Everest A-F.
(IMITATES EXPLOSION) What?! But he's not seeking enlightenment, he's just a tourist! Yeah! And to make matters worse, these tourists are total slobs! So many climbers abandon tents, equipment, and other items on their climb, every year the mountain accumulates around 50 new tons of trash.
Ugh.
Dude, can we Postmates a maid up here? Oh, that is shameful! I will be taking all of my waste with me.
Yeah? Well, don't forget about your human waste.
Everest tourists annually leave behind around 26,000 pounds of pee and poop.
And since it takes longer for waste to disintegrate at high altitudes, that means this majestic mountain is now covered in our poop-sicles.
So much human waste has built up over the years that local villages' major water sources are now completely polluted, and their yaks frequently get stuck in ponds of human poop.
I can't imagine anything more disturbing.
Well, it gets worse.
Because Everest is also covered in dead bodies.
This once-pristine peak is steadily becoming the world's tallest frozen cemetery.
(THUNDER CRASHING) Hundreds of people have died on Everest.
For every ten successful summits, there's one dead body.
And since the temperatures are so frigid, they'll never decompose.
There are so many frozen corpses on Everest, climbers actually use them to navigate.
Holy shit, is that a dead guy? Tight that means we make a left.
But Everest isn't just dangerous for visitors.
The indigenous Sherpas are the ones taking the real risks Mapping out routes and securing guide ropes, all while babysitting these amateur alpinists.
Ah, dude, can you take a photo of me? (ADAM) It's one of the deadliest jobs on the planet.
A third of people who die on Everest are Sherpas.
Oh, back up more so you can get that cloud that looks like a Ahhh! Oh! Whoa! He's okay.
My trash broke his fall.
This is appalling! Not only are these narcissistic tourists ruining this sacred mountain, but they're getting people killed? Why hasn't the government of Nepal limited the amount of people who can climb? They can't afford to.
Nepal is a very low-income nation, and Everest tourism is a major industry.
Sorry, how many people are in your tour? My girl wants a destination wedding at the summit, and then we're all gonna paraglide down.
Ha! I am nothing like that guy! I'm afraid you are.
I know it's your dream to climb this sacred mountain.
But the impact that you and others have when you indulge in that dream is turning Everest into a poop-covered trash coffin.
Oh, you're right.
I am no better than those monsters who picnic in national parks.
People ruin everything! (ECHOING) An avalanche! See? No matter how bad people mess things up, Mother Nature is still in charge! Come on, let's run! Actually, so-called natural disasters are pretty much human-made.
Come on, I'll show ya.
(CHUCKLES) Ah, I wish you'd let me fall off that cliff.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC) Welcome back to the Weather History Channel, also known as the only channel your dad ever watches.
Every time a natural disaster occurs, the news reports on it as though it's an unstoppable act of God.
Right, Mother Nature could destroy us at any moment, and we are powerless to prevent it.
Wrong! Tonight, we revisit some of the most deadly natural disasters in recent history, and discover that these "acts of God" are very much human creations.
For more on that, let's go to our disconcertingly cheery chief meteorologist, Drip Dripley.
Well, howdy do, and how are you, Adam? Hurricane Katrina was one monster of a mess.
1,800 people died and 80% of the population of New Orleans was displaced.
But I'm gonna shock you here.
The surprising truth is, Hurricane Katrina was not the storm of the century.
In fact, it may have been as weak as a Category 1 when it hit New Orleans.
Only a Category 1? Then why all the destruction? Good question, Mr.
Mountain Main.
The real culprit wasn't the storm itself, it was our failure to prepare for it.
Half of New Orleans lies below sea level, which means it relied on these levees to control flooding.
But the levees were constructed out of sand built atop porous soil, which made them extremely vulnerable to rapid erosion during Katrina.
Whoa, wipe out! (SINGING) Drip! Inappropriate! (LAUGHING) Sorry, Adam.
Now, these levees had been desperately in need of maintenance for decades.
According to an engineering investigator (DOLPHIN CHIRPING) Whoa, I should not be allowed on television! And this pattern of negligence holds across every major natural disaster in recent history.
For more, let's go to the Weather History Channel's own Mr.
Science, Hurricane Harvey.
That's my name, and what I'm here to talk about! Hurricane Harvey is a textbook example of how human choices artificially turned a minor hurricane into a devastating flood! Up until the 1960s, Houston was naturally protected from major flooding thanks to its coastal prairies, which absorbed flood waters before they could do any damage.
Ooh! But as the city expanded, greedy developers exploited legal loopholes to pave over those prairies.
And worse, they didn't even tell new residents that they now lived in a flood zone.
So, when Harvey hit, the water had nowhere to go, and 47,000 people were displaced.
And worst of all, my breakfast is ruined.
Back to you, Adam! (CHUCKLING) Harvey.
So that area only flooded because of how humans modified the land? It's unbelievable! Okay, what about Maria, huh? That storm was huge.
Good question! For more on that, let's go to our time-traveling storm chaser, Dan Champion, who's on the scene at Hurricane Maria.
Thanks, Adam! Every time there's a major storm, the media sends dopes like me to stand outside and get rained on for your amusement.
But the truth is, it wasn't the wind and rain that was responsible for the estimated thousands of lives lost in Puerto Rico.
It was because after the storm the island went 84 days without water and 64 days without electricity.
The corporate corruption and government neglect that led to those failures was the real killer.
Back to you, Adam.
I'm going the (BLEEP) inside.
So, all those people died and we could have prevented it? Yes.
But I'm afraid the problem is much bigger than just a failure to prepare.
Our collective impact on the planet has led to climate change on such a massive scale, it's actually making disasters stronger.
And for more on that, we have Dr.
Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University.
Always a pleasure to appear on a parody of the Weather Channel, Adam.
And you're right, we can say with a great degree of confidence that climate change is making hurricanes and other weather disasters more extreme.
Now, Michael, how is that possible? Explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old who hates science and thinks climate change is a hippie crack-pot conspiracy.
When you burn fossil fuels, you warm the atmosphere, you warm the ocean.
A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so these storms produce more rainfall.
For every additional degree of warmth, wind speeds for the strongest storms increase by about 10 miles per hour.
Now, that translates to a nearly 25% increase in the destructiveness of these storms.
The warming also slows down the jet stream, so these storms stay parked in the same spot for longer, giving you even more rainfall and worse flooding.
Not only that, climate change has caused unprecedented wildfires in North America in recent years.
Global warming gives you more heat waves, it dries out forests, so you get larger, more destructive wildfires.
The truth is, Birch, human activity is making extreme weather events more destructive.
And if we continue to burn fossil fuels and put carbon pollution into the atmosphere, we are gonna see worse and worse droughts, heat waves, superstorms, floods, and wildfires.
That's unbelievable.
Believe it.
As mighty as nature is, our impact on the planet is even greater.
See, this is why we need to be protecting and preserving our planet, not choking it to death with our noxious emissions! God, I cannot wait to get back to pure, wild, untrammeled nature! (GRUNTS) What Birch hasn't fully absorbed yet is that no spot on Earth is free from human impact.
We all affect nature.
Every breath you take, every move you make I'll be watching you.
Now, this is why I love climatologists.
You folks are hilarious.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) (SIGHING) Finally pure, pristine, unadulterated nature.
(ADAM, IN BRITISH ACCENT) Observe the homo sapien.
He believes he is a humble, respectful visitor in nature.
But little does he know, his very presence on this planet irreparably changes it.
Hey, who is talking?! In anger, he tears at the undergrowth, revealing our trusty narrator.
Like all humans, he wreaks havoc on nature wherever he goes.
Okay, David Atten-Boring, that is not true.
I preserve nature.
I donate to the National Parks Foundation, I am on the board The human chatters in protest, not realizing that even national parks are human-made constructions.
What? In fact, the man who conceived of the very idea, John Muir, himself irreparably altered an entire ecosystem in American's greatest park, Yosemite.
Ah, there he is now, entering Yosemite for the very first time.
My goodness! We must preserve this pristine and untrammeled wilderness.
But the truth is, it wasn't untrammeled at all.
Are you gonna do that voice for the whole time? (IN NORMAL VOICE) Nah, that was enough.
The Ahwahnechee People had made their home in the area we now know as Yosemite for at least 3,500 years.
But Muir didn't consider them natural in the least.
These people are most ugly, some altogether hideous.
They have no right place in the landscape.
Get them out of here! (RIFLE COCKING) Wait, the father of America's national parks believed in ethnic cleansing? Pretty much, yeah.
But what Muir didn't realize was the supposedly pristine nature he found was in fact created by the Ahwahnechee, because for millennia, they had cultivated the land by selectively pruning plants, sowing seeds, and setting controlled fires.
What? But forest fires are bad, right? To the contrary.
Forest fires are actually necessary to maintain the health of a forest.
And by conducting controlled burns, the Ahwahnechee cleared undergrowth and made space for new plants to grow, increasing biodiversity.
Only we can start forest fires.
(GUN COCKING) After they were kicked out, the undergrowth returned, and without regular controlled fires, the forest became twice as dense, and as more vegetation had to compete for water, drier.
So now, instead of many small controlled burns, Yosemite is more prone to rare-but-extreme wildfires.
Muir didn't preserve Yosemite's landscape he completely altered it.
What?! I thought that conversation was all about preserving nature in its natural state To have as little impact as possible.
Sorry.
Try as we might, our species is incapable of having no impact on the natural world.
Everywhere we go is affected by our presence.
Simply going on a hike in the woods changes the ecosystem you visit.
One study found that hiking trails create a corridor of impact, wherein wildlife reacts to human presence up to 100 meters on either side of the trail.
And just by traveling from place to place, we introduce non-native species into new environments all the time, even if it's just the tiny bacteria and fungi on your shoes.
(BIRCH) But people have to travel.
How am I supposed to protect nature if I can't even get to it? (ADAM) The truth is, there quite literally isn't a spot on Earth that hasn't been impacted by humanity's existence.
The Atlantic Ocean is so crowded with fishing boats, shipping lines, undersea cables and chemical runoff, that right whales now effectively live in a noisy and polluted underwater city.
To feed our massive appetite, humanity now breeds so much livestock that our animal food supply outweighs all other terrestrial mammals by 14 times.
We've even changed the air itself.
5,000 years ago the dawn of rice farming released so much methane into the atmosphere it actually thwarted a second Ice Age.
And thanks to increased forest clearing, factory emissions, electricity generation, and transportation, every breath we take now contains 41% more carbon dioxide than it did in 1750.
The hard truth is, human activity is altering the Earth's fundamental systems on such a massive scale, scientists believe we've actually entered a new geological age The Anthropocene.
(WOMAN) Otherwise known as the Age of Humans.
(ADAM) Birch, this is Emma Marris, a science writer who's written extensively about the Anthropocene.
But pure nature must exist somewhere, right? I've seen it in nature documentaries.
Actually, those documentaries are part of the problem.
They're usually filmed as if they're in a vast wilderness filled with animals.
But often, they're filmed right by the road, and they just cut it out of the shot.
(HORN HONKING) What? No! The truth is, the majority of the Earth is neither totally humanized or totally wild.
It's somewhere in between.
We've altered three-quarters of the land on Earth.
We have dammed rivers, we have acidified the oceans, we have pumped the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, and we have moved plants and animals around on a massive scale.
And our effects on the planet threaten life on Earth.
Our impact is immense and deeply scary.
Entire ecosystems are on the verge of being wiped out.
And because we transformed their homes and turned up the temperature, and introduced new predators, many species are on the verge of extinction.
A meteor triggered the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
And unless we make drastic changes in how we live, we could be the next meteor.
And although the planet will survive, our impact will be felt in the geological record for eternity.
So, there's no pristine, untouched nature to preserve.
I'm afraid not.
Well, how do I go on living in a world like that? Don't lose heart, Birch.
There's still so much we can do to protect the nature right in our own back No, Adam! Just leave me here to die.
There's nothing left to talk about.
Man, he is taking this hard.
Pfft.
Nature bros.
(WHISTLING THEME) Just leave me here to die, Adam.
What's the point of living if there's no more nature to protect? No matter how I try and minimize my impact, it's too late! Forest beasts and insects come! Feast upon my pitiful human flesh! Return me to the earth so that I may harm you no more.
Yikes.
Birch, you are taking this too hard, man.
Yeah, I think I see the problem.
Birch, if you try to define nature as a place that's totally untouched by humanity, yeah, you're not gonna find that on this planet.
But I think you just have the wrong definition.
Instead, you could define nature as anywhere where live thrives, anywhere where there's multiple species interacting.
And when you do that, something kind of amazing happens.
This becomes just as much a part of nature as Yosemite is.
Even a city park like this one is full of diverse plants, insects, and other species, including humans! We're a part of nature too.
And yes, that means we can't help but impact it.
But we're unique among all these species in that we can understand and change the impact we're having.
And that gives us the power and the responsibility to nourish and protect the natural world.
The trends we talked about today are troubling.
But we can slow and even reverse them if we act now to fight climate change, and to protect not just the nature out there, but also the nature here in our own backyards.
And that way, you and everyone can have a life filled with nature every day.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna do a little urban bird watching.
(BIRD CALLING) (GASPS) A bufflehead? This time of year? Amazing.
Wow.
You know, I never thought of it that way.
I don't have to go out into the wilderness to commune with nature.
It's all around me! (LAUGHS) Hello, anas platyrhynchos! (DUCK QUACKING) And hello to you, muhlenbergia rigens.
And a heartfelt hello to you homo sapiens.
Birch, you're back.
I thought you said city hikes were beneath you and you needed to climb Mount Everest to "escape.
" (CLEARS THROAT) My fellow outdoors people! Please, forgive me.
I now see the error of my ways.
This urban park is worthy of as much respect as the highest peaks.
Will you accept me back into your fold? Uh sure.
We're leaving now, though.
Oh! (LAUGHS) Oh, Adam, I can't thank you enough.
I now feel more in touch with nature than I ever did before.
Would you like to join our hike? I would love to! I even brought a snack.
My patented trail bologna.
Um never mind.
Okay, haha, more for me! Mm! Sweet and slimy! (CHUCKLES) Mm! (WHISTLING THEME) Okay, so we're here at Griffith Park, which is the big park in LA.
And we've been shooting here all day.
You keep pointing out all these animals all around us.
Well, we keep getting practically interrupted by, like, herds of deer, and red-tail hawks come swooping out of the sky, and there's acorn woodpeckers flitting amongst us.
We're shooting a scene where it's supposed to be ecological devastation, and we're getting, like, mobbed by wildlife.
So, that's your point, right? That, like, there's so much nature all around us that we don't We don't even acknowledge.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of my points, one of my many points, but I think Sure.
You have your one of many points.
But I do, I think that, you know, we've been sort of trained in part by nature documentaries to see nature as something that's far away and out there Right.
and it's something that only rich people can afford to access.
And often, that means that we just don't have our nature eyes on when we're just walking around the city, but there's tons here.
And your philosophy is, make more nature everywhere we can.
Yes.
And the nice thing about not fixating on this sort of super-pristine untouched nature, is that you can't make more of that stuff.
Mm.
You can't make more of untouched nature.
Right.
But you can make more nature.
You can take a place that's denuded of species, and you can bring that biodiversity level up.
I read a study recently that since 1970, like, 60% of wildlife has declined in areas that we thought were, hey, wild, and the animals just hanging out there.
How do we remain optimistic when that's happening? Well, we need to take those declines really seriously.
But I think that it's important to realize that those are declines in the numbers of each species, not in the numbers of species, right? Okay.
So 60% of species aren't extinct.
It's just many species are on these downward trends.
Got it.
So, the bad news is, the numbers of animals are going down 'cause we are squeezing them out.
Mm-hmm.
But the good news is, is that there's still time to turn the ship around.
There is still time to reform our ways and to change our ways so that these species can come back.
How do we do that? What what are things that people can do? Well, there's a bunch of really important structural things that we need to do, right? So, we can all be super-good, and we can all have our bag that we take to the grocery store.
(LAUGHING) The canvas bag, yeah, yeah.
The canvas bags.
But what we really need to do is we really need to have, like, big, big changes in how in what kind of fuels we're using, the kind of energy mix that we're using.
Yeah.
How we're permitting development.
Those new roads that you think are inevitable, like, we can decide not to build those new roads.
Or build them differently or put them in different places, or Yeah, right.
You know, there are big systemic things to do.
So, I actually think that the most important thing that we can do as individuals is get a little bit politically involved.
Mm.
Actually, that's more important than the whole shopping bag thing.
I mean, we've all been sort of trained that the way we can be good people is being good consumers and buying the right kind of green stuff.
But I think that it's actually better to occasionally just feed your kids a frozen pizza, and then go to the city council meeting and make sure that the zoning laws Right, right.
in your town are conducive to biodiversity.
It is really dire.
Situation is bad.
There's a lot of work to do.
But the message that I hope that we can bring across is that it isn't too late, right? Because if it's too late, then people stop trying to make a change.
Right.
The goals that are important to me are stopping extinctions, increasing biodiversity, making sure that everybody and their brother has access to nature.
Right.
Those are goals that are achievable, right? And they don't involve trying to go back in time.
It's a changing world, it's not gonna go back to some pristine, pure state.
And there never was some magical day that everything was right with the world.
Yeah.
We just gotta keep figuring out how can we make a better world looking forward.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for coming.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you for having me.