Could you talk a little bit about growing up in St John’s?
Well, sure. I grew up on Queen’s Road, which was sort of a boundary between the downtown and you just had to walk over to Bannerman Park and you were suddenly in the suburbs. But Queen’s Road was definitively downtown. I was the eldest of five, and there was always a lot of kids around; it was when five kids was a small family. So there was always people in the house and people in the street. It was a full life, if not an entirely satisfactory one, because there was the neighbourhood bully, who grew up to become a cop. I think the one thing I really recall about growing up; long afterwards, I was in St John’s alone, and I had been down in the west end somewhere, and I walked back all the way up Queen’s Road, walking to my brother’s house, he had a house then near the Hotel, on Gower Street. And I came to one of the [cross] streets running down to the harbour, I got to the corner and it flashed in my head that this was the border. If you crossed this street you were in hostile territory, you’d get the shit beat out of you, but as long as you didn’t cross the street you were all right. It was that sort of place, which was educational. It was definitively an old-fashioned childhood, you know?  It was changing fast at that point. There was Murphy’s shop on the corner and they had horses for delivering groceries when there were snowstorms and you couldn’t get out. It was like looking at some pictures from the late 19^th century. It sounds like it was much longer ago than it actually was.

You are known as a military historian, but this is your second book about climate change, following Climate Wars, but it struck me that you weren’t really putting on a new hat. You’re assessing threats of one kind or another; it seemed to me that you didn’t have to change your skill set at all.
That’s true. I mean it’s basically … I spent a very long time worrying about nuclear war and things like that, even made a television series about it, and I guess sometime around the beginning of this century, 2005 or something like that, I realized it wasn’t the biggest threat. Nuclear war is always a threat, it doesn’t go away, but the edge had gone off it, the Soviet Union was gone. There wasn’t a Cold War. [Global warming] was a bigger threat anyway, it would have been the bigger threat even with a Cold War. So you naturally migrate to that, because what you’re doing, the sort of journalism I do is about threats. That’s what international journalism is about. So it was a pretty natural migration. I didn’t intend to stay with it, I thought I’ll do Climate Wars and I figured I’d done it. I never really stopped doing it after that because it just kept coming at you. Fifteen years later enough had piled up that it was time to do it again. And I did it much more comprehensively this time. This book took me three years of interviewing. I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than a year before.

There’s a lot in the book.
Yeah, it holds the covers apart.

It’s surprisingly hopeful.
We aren’t doomed, we really aren’t doomed. This is a solvable problem, the climate’s a solvable problem. But it will require measures that people aren’t ready to take yet, and there is a question whether they will ever be ready on time. As things get worse they get more engaged but also things are worse. Some people just fall on the hopeful side, is the glass half full or half empty, and I’m definitely a half full guy. I recognize that in myself. I have both a sister and a wife who are of the other persuasion. But there is also what I would call objective evidence for not being in despair about the problem. What you might want to go into despair about is our behaviour. But I try not to.

Is there one central message that you want people to get from this? Is it to change their behaviour? Is it to hack the planet?
I am not focusing on picking up litter. Walking rather than driving is probably from a health point of view better and if you happen to own a car then we have some questions to ask you about what kind of car and fuel and all that. But that’s not going to be determinant in whether we get through this without any casualties or a lot of casualties or just don’t get through it. That will depend much more on political decisions which we have to participate in. But it’s not individual behaviour which is at issue here. I will never by my personal effort make any decisions that determine which kind of power we use, is it nuclear, it is fossil fuel, is it renewables? The only way I can ask those questions is politically. And that’s were 90% of the problem is. It’s not human beings being more conscious about things. I mean we could be more conscious about things in general, but you really have to concentrate where are the emissions coming from, who’s telling you what stories about them, and how do you replace them? Because you’re not going to stop being a high energy society. You can’t keep eight billion people alive on the planet in any other way than being a high energy society.

Join us next week for the second and final part of our conversation with Dyer.

Intervention Earth is published by Random House Canada ($36.95)

Earth Rise photograph taken by Bill Anders, astronaut, Apollo 8