Rob:  Now in some of your papers, you talk about a difference between living in a palace, and then living in a mud hut.  If you will, go ahead and expand on that.
Avery:  Well, we’ve got two wildly different models being presented for society in the 21st century.  And one of them is based on technological abundance.  And I call that the suburban palace model.  Big, air conditioned houses, computers, Internet connections, an SUV if you want it, a sports car if you prefer that, and extending these in some form to a significant degree to China, and India, and Nigeria.  And the other model is being presented by a much smaller group of people, but they are very urgent in their presentation, and they get a lot of media coverage.  And they’re saying that we should want less, use less, take less.  And to me it’s ironic that one of these models would protect the wildlife and the quality of human life, and the other model would protect neither.  The organic farming, use less model, would immediately destroy most of the world’s wildlife, unless it immediately destroyed most humans.  And it offers no long term assurance that either people or wildlife will do well.  And I think we’ve proven in the last hundred years, that technological abundance, not only works for people, but it’s the rich people in the world that are able to eliminate air pollution, eliminate the need to clear additional land for low-yield crops, prevent water pollution.  Most of the world is in the most polluting phase of industrial development.  If you go to China, India, Nigeria, the smokestacks are spewing, land is being cleared, chemical plants are in full flourish.  And it’s the post industrial affluence society that can afford to care about the environment, because their kids are already fed, and they’ve already got a doctor.  A very important book called, THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, written by a Danish statistician named, Bjørn Lomborg, looked at the world’s trends, environmentally, the same statistics that the environmentalists wail about; and said, look, almost everything is getting better, and it’s getting better most and fastest in the rich countries.  And he says if we’re worried about global warming, we ought to take the global warming money and use it to install public health and food security in the third world, and their environments will start to improve as well, and we’re probably not going to be able to stop global warming anyway, because, we’ve historically had global warming and global cooling back into history.  
Rob:  Now, if you would, could you boil everything down, the way that you feel, and just say three or four sentences, and explain your position?
Avery:  Whew, three or four sentences is tough.  You are tough.  Rich people, technologically sophisticated people, do better by their kids; they do better by nature; they are more sustainable.  And our goal ought to be, I mean, nostalgia is fine; but, nostalgia is not going to save the forests, and it’s not going to save, I mean, we don’t even have that many of the world’s species.  Two hundred thousand above ground species in the whole of North America.  They found that many in five square miles of the tropical rain forest.  But how we manage the land we do have determines whether we’re going to save that five square miles.  And we have a responsibility to do it.  And those genes are a wonderful resource for people who understand DNA.  And we can create the kind of affluent, sustainable society that could win the loyalty of both sides.  But we can’t go back.  We haven’t got the stomach to shoot four-billion people.  And we haven’t got the stomach to let poor people clear all of the world’s wildlife habitat.
Rob:  Now, if I understand you, we’re not doing anyone a favor, be it ourselves or be it the third world, by not either allowing them, or either helping them farm in a more sustainable method?
Avery:  We created the green revolution, here in America.  We literally extended it to the third world in the 1960s.  We saved a billion people from starving, immediately.  We saved 12-million square miles of wildlife.  And now the challenge is to hold that gain, while we elevate the lifestyle choices of the other five-billion people, what will be the other seven-billion people, instead of condemning them to mud huts and short, ugly, crude lives.  It’s not enough for our kids to live well.  Everybody’s kids should have the opportunity to live well, without destroying nature.  
Rob:  And as I understand it, people are becoming more meat eaters around the world.  Is that an accurate statement?
Avery:  Yeah.  The International Food Policy Research Institute two years ago, finally, issued a paper saying, are we ready for the meat revolution?  There has never, in all history, been a voluntarily vegetarian society.  Probably the closest we’ve come were the Mayans and Aztecs and Middle America before the Europeans came.  No grass, no room in the animals, nasty tendency toward eating their neighbors, eighty-five thousand sacrificial victims at one Aztec temple dedication.  And three-quarters of the Hindus in India say they will eat meat, not beef, but meat, when they can afford it.  There’ll even be a pet challenge.  China will probably have 500-million companion cats and dogs.  Affluent, one-child, society, those parenting instincts will go somewhere; and woe unto any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.  The paleontologists say it’s easy to tell the difference between the hunters’ skeletons and the farmers’ skeletons when they dig them out of the ground.  The farmers were runty, littler guys with bone diseases and smaller cranial capacities.  The hunters were taller, stronger, maybe smarter, but they couldn’t feed as many people, and the farmers always won on sheer numbers.  They just elbowed the hunters and gatherers off all the good land.  And now, in the last century, for the first time, we’ve been able to provide high quality diets for a lot of people through high-yield farming.  This is not some esoteric debate, this is your children’s future, and nobody anywhere in the world in any sizeable numbers has ever said, I want my kids small and scrawny, and I’m not going to let ‘em have milk, not going to let ‘em have eggs.