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I'm Steve carbon publisher of Wharton digital press and I'm here today with
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Simon Winchester who's editor of a fascinating and wide-ranging new book Pacific which covers a great deal of
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ground to read from the subtitle silicon chips and surfboards coral reefs and atom bombs brutal dictators fading
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empires in the coming collision of the world's superpowers Simon good afternoon hello you begin
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your book earth being a book talk about the fact that the Pacific Ocean is coming to symbolize the future that the
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Mediterranean was once the Inland Sea of the ancient world the Atlantic to some people was the Inland Sea of the modern
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world and that you can argue that the Pacific Ocean will be the Inland Sea of tomorrow's world
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what does that mean well it's the place where at least in my view the two great
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civilizations finally meet and confront each other and we have humankind originating in Ethiopia with one group
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going off east to Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and Peking and the other group going through the Balkans and up
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into Europe many Europeans crossing the Atlantic into the Americas and under the
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impress of the manifest destiny making their way west to the shores of the Pacific and then after Balboa first saw
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it in 15-20 crossing it and then confronting the other great civilization so you've got the East and civilization
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on the west side of the Pacific and the west and civilizations on the east side of the Pacific it's all a bit of
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geographical topsy-turvy damn and how do these two peoples deal with each other and the way that has happened is that in
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the past they have generally speaking colonized or brutalized or enslaved or in some way spoiled the lives of the
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Easterners but then in the beginning I suppose in the 1970s the Americans withdrew from Southeast Asia
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the British withdrew from their vast colonial Imperium in the Pacific Ocean the Germans the Japanese have left and
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the Pacific peoples are now says it were standing on their own two feet for the first time since we Europeans
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began interfering with their lives and now it seems to me that these two great civilizations are have the potential to
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cooperate at long last with one another and I think as a consequence of that we're seeing a real sort of hinge point
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of history that we're going to see that shift in the sort of dominance of let's
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say Rome and it's going to move now to the dominance of let us say Peking or
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Beijing very roughly and that change of order is going to happen in and around the Pacific which is why I think the
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Pacific is important in all of humankind's futures interestingly one underlying motive of your book is the
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when you notice the end of the Vasco de Gama era the sudden and very wholesale distribution of world power and then
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after you just know that after half a millennium of the West's dominating Pacific it now seems to be the turn of
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the Asians and you argue that it would be a good thing that the Asia for the Asians office are possibly of greatest
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stability for the region why should the Asians do a better job than the West Minister because with the single
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exception of the Japanese in a spasm of unpleasantness from the 1930s to the middle of the 1940s the Asians have been
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much more benign in their management of the world than we Westerners have I mean
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the Chinese to give a classy example I mean the most populous country on earth has not with the single exception of
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Tibet really overreached itself they have remained contentedly within their own borders they've been the Middle
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Kingdom John Wall they have been content with who they are and not wishing to export themselves culturally or
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imperially in the way that we Westerners done I mean we Westerners have gone around the world dominating and may
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enslaving and influencing millions billions of people and generally although leaving in the case of the
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British and the Americans leaving the legacy of the English language that's true and certain types of legal
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frameworks and so forth and one might argue railways and postal systems and so forth but nonetheless generally speaking
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we have left a legacy which is embedded in it the seeds of all sorts of conflicts I mean you've only got to look
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in the Middle East and look at the borders that we drew look at India Pakistan look at Northern Ireland look
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at Israel so Eastern countries have not done that kind of thing generally speaking yes there have been some
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excesses so I think I would rather live in a world run by Asians than in a rat world run by us is it likely to be that
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smoother transition are we likely to go from a world run by Asians we're run by
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us to world run by Asians without conflict and disorder well that's my hope I think no they're going to be all
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sorts of rough patches which may take many decades to resolve and out of the classical situation is the one evolving
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at the moment in in the South China Sea which is the Chinese have this fairly worked out stratagem of expanding their
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Navy into the Pacific they've already as it were taken a factor if not de jure
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control of the South China Sea and they have these imagine Bastion chains of islands extending outwards all the way
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up to Hawaii and they think and in my view quite reasonably the Americans have dominated the Pacific Ocean naval air
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for the last 60 years we're a Pacific nation we have a big Navy we're rich and
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influential why can't we at least have maritime equivalents well the Pentagon regards that as
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threatening idea regarded as threatening in the slightest because the Chinese are
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not likely to do what we have done which is to colonize and enslave and dominate
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they just want to as I say enjoy equivalents but so long as that is feared by people then there's the
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potential for conflict there's also the potential for accidents of course and so
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the potential for conflict will lead undeniably to confrontations here and there but in overall general long-term
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historical sense nothing that can't be dealt with and then it'll all settle
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down into this new world order I think one hopes China does seem to be extending its territoriality
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sequentially in the Pacific from the first chain to the second chain to the third chain how should the u.s. react to
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that I think by trying to understand why she's doing this why China is seeking
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this maritime equivalents and not being fearful of its potential because I don't
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think that it is dangerous I think I mean a classic example is is the Yangtze River I mean I was watching recently
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this wonderful film I daresay have seen it called the sand pebbles with Candice Bergen and Steve McQueen on an American
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gunboat in the Yangtze putting down all sorts of problems in the 1920s and 30s reminds us that American warships
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Italian German French and British warships were able to operate deep inside China on the Yangtze River for 50
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years and that if anyone committed a crime for a ship the Sailor got involved in a fight in Wuhan or Chongqing that
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wouldn't be judged by the Chinese courts heaven no we were not gonna have one of
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our people judged by a Chinese Magister see we'll try them on our own course it
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was this principle of extraterritoriality which we you know arrogantly assumed was right but how
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would we feel if the Chinese Navy were operating in the Mississippi and one of their sailors gets involved in a fight
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in Hannibal Missouri and says we don't want to be judged by your Missouri courts will be judged by our naval
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courts so because we have behaved in a certain way in the Pacific doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the
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civilized world and no one would argue that China is not part of the civilized worlds I mean after all their
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civilization is 20 times as old as ours I think they'll behave in a perfectly
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civilized manner they simply want equivalents and they want respect and I think they should be given it will you
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characterize Western dominance in terms of aircraft carriers nuclear tests coral
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bleaching and pollution and argue that the Chinese warships and them being a little unfair will lead to
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reverence accommodation admiration and awe and the question is why should the Chinese warships going out to the second
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and third chain of islands be more benign than the Western warships were in the same place because they they're
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simply seeking equivalents they're not suggesting that their warships are there
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for any malign purpose it's simply a symbol of the extension of Chinese influence Chinese cultural influence
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will follow the flag if you like in the same way that trade tended to follow the
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flag I just don't think we need to fear them but the Pentagon does and of course
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what does the the military-industrial complex too modest or the Chinese are ramping up their Navy so we need to get
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a second aircraft carrier into the western Pacific and we need to buy more submarines and we all know that that's
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that leads to leads nowhere except whatever increasing tax burden on the American people and let me shift gears a
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minute and you talk about climate change and you know the increasing extreme weather events in the western Pacific
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and North America but then you argued that the point and the planet may heal itself and that the world in its
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creature who survived and that the Pacific Ocean could serve as a gigantic safety valve that's essential to the
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future of the planet how will the Pacific Ocean help to provide some self-regulating remedy to
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the man-made disruption of the well there are two answers to that one is that undeniably the Pacific simply
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because of its vastness is an enormous absorber of heat from the Sun I mean its water holds heat much longer than rocks
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do if you stand under a rock in the desert at night the rock goes cold if you stand in a body of water it will
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retain that heat for a very much longer time the Pacific absorbs heat and as it does so it produces because it's taking
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so much more heat at the moment it produces more ferocious weather locally bigger storms all that sort of thing but
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nonetheless it is there to absorb the heat and to create yes by doing so inconveniences for human
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kind but nonetheless for the planet as a whole the fact that it is absorbing heat
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is a good thing because this helps the planet as a whole disregarding humankind survive it maybe
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it helps it whether these changes these distortions in the atmosphere but there's another aspect of this which I
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found completely fascinating in which I discovered when I was writing a book about the Atlantic Ocean which is that
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there is this creature which we didn't even know existed until 1989 which exists in all the oceans of the world in
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the warm waters from about 40 North to about 30 south called prochlorococcus which is a single-celled algal creature
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which absorbs carbon dioxide and expels oxygen and this is the most numerous creature on the planet trillions upon
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trillions of these things which emit oxygen such that 1 in 5 of the breaths that you and I are taking in the studio
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today has been generated by a creature that we didn't even even know existed as
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recently as 1989 well the thing about prochlorococcus is it loves warm water and so the warmer the waters get the
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warm that the higher the temperature of the oceans produced by the global warming that we all disapprove of the
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more prochlorococcus they'll be the greater the range the more carbon dioxide they limit their there they'll
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absorb and the more oxygen they'll emit this is a classic example of the planet
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healing itself the Gaia theory James Lovelock's theory that the planet as a whole is a self-regulating mechanism we
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humans are in irrelevance really we're just we're soon going to be fossils we
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will love be like ammonites and tryla bites will just be another slightly more annoying temporary inhabitant of the
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planet the planet will be okay will disappear hoist on our own petard troubled by the troubles that we created
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you close by talking about sailing canoes in navigation in the attempt to replicate some of the older
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trans-pacific ventures could you talk about that a little bit and it all where we going in the future Hokulea is
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a traditional Hawaiian sailing canoe huge thing about 60 feet long twin hulls two sails built in 1976 by a group of
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Hawaiians as Hawaii's gift to America for the bicentenary they weren't just
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gifting the physical physical object of the canoe they were gifting the skill of
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navigating without instruments because that's what the Polynesians did for thousands of years before we came along
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they you know this is big triangle with Hawaii in the north and Easter Island in
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the east and New Zealand or air tiara in the West and the Polynesians would happily sail from Easter Island to New
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Zealand without using any instruments without any compass without any sixth and just by studying the movement of
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clouds the Stars the feel of the waves the tracks of seabirds and things and if they wanted to go 5,000 miles from from
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Easter Island they could in the old days until we came along and said sorry Easter Island is Chilean and the next
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islands are French and then there's a British and these are American islands
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to sail through them you'll need a passport and they said what what's a passport and they swirl you need
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application forms and they said we can't read or write we've never seen a need to
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and the navigation effectively died people stopped doing this there were one or two people that knew how to do it one
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in particular when they hold him up to Hawaii in 1976 taught a group of local Hawaiians how to sail this canoe without
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any instruments and he said we can get to Tahiti in six weeks and they got to Tahiti in exactly six weeks and this
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encouraged the Hawaiians and they set to learning these skills and they took their little boat up to Japan reminding
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the Japanese that they were very much of Pacific peoples they took it to Vancouver they took it to Chile and now
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they've become incredibly good at it and now they're sailing it around the world
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and this little craft is at the time we're talking she's just arrived in
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South Africa in Mossel Bay and she'll be going round Cape of Good Hope up in
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to the Atlantic Ocean and the aim is that by sometime this coming summer she will sail up the Potomac and show
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herself and introduce the crew of this remarkable venture to their Hawaiian president to remind him what Polynesian
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people should do and then they'll scoot down the east coast of South America
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through the Magellan straits and up two boards Hawaii and home it'll take four
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years to do the whole journey and my feeling is that if they get adequate publicity and we come to realize this
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extraordinary nature of this achievement then we will give to them and the ocean
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on which they're sailing something which has been sorely lacking from us Westerners and that is our respect and
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that's what I'm hoping for and I think that's what they're hoping for
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so Hokulea dot-com is the website that you can go to to follow the progress of this remarkable little craft salmon we
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Chesser thank you very much and again the book is called Pacific thank you very much indeed
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you