10 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2012
by Karen Christensen
An epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox
has taken on five current global threats. The good news is,
he’s optimistic about finding solutions.
Thought Leader Interview:
Larry Brilliant
While at university, you attended a presentation by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that ‘changed you forever’. How so?
I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan at the time, and I was extremely depressed. My father had died a few weeks before, and five days later my grandfather died. I went back to college and locked myself in my room, refusing to go out. Then I saw an article in the Michigan Daily that Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to our campus. This was 1962, so nobody really knew who he was yet; but for some reason, I decided to go.
On the day of the presentation there was a major snowstorm – the sort of day when nobody in their right mind goes out; but I did. When I got to the auditorium – which could hold 2,000 people – there were only a few dozen students there. Dr. King got up and looked at all the empty chairs, and he just laughed and laughed. He said, “All right, you guys, come on up here,” and we all got up on the stage and sat around in a circle with him. What was to have been an hour-long talk became four or five hours, as he spoke about his dream of a world free of racism in which “we are all in it together.”
Those words really resonated with me, and with everybody who was on the stage that day. All of us went down to Missis-sippi or Alabama that summer to work with Dr. King, beginning a lifetime commitment to social change. He didn’t just change me forever that day, he changed a generation.
You went on to help eradicate smallpox in the early 1970s. Describe what this period of your life taught you about optimism.
In 1969 I graduated from Wayne State University’s School of Medicine, where I was trained as a surgeon, and right after I did my internship, I developed cancer of the parathyroid gland. I was operated on, and I had plenty of free time while I was healing. Watching the news, I saw that a group of Native Americans had taken over Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. One of the native women wanted to have her baby on what she perceived as Indi-an-liberated land, but no doctor would go out there to help. There was no water, no electricity and no health care. I decided to go. ILL
U S TRA TION B Y LIS A SMITH
12 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2012
THE FIVE ISSUES BEING TACKLED BY THE SKOLL GLOBAL THREATS FUND
Climate Change: The climate is changing in ways that jeopardize human security and well being. The global warming trend we are currently experiencing differs alarmingly from past changes in the Earth’s climate. This warming is largely driven by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, agriculture, and clearing of for-ests, which release heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide. The effects of rising temperatures and shifting precipitation pat-terns are already being felt across the globe. We no longer have the luxury of treating this as a future problem: climate change is with us today and we need to tackle it from a risk management perspective. This will require aggressive actions to reduce emis-sions of heat-trapping gases to avoid the risks of the most severe impacts, coupled with systems-based approaches to building resilience to climate variability and change.
Pandemics: Few things hold the power to stop the global economy in its tracks. A pandemic is one of them. In addition to the high human costs of suffering, pandemics can stop travel and commerce and create political tension. With globalization and the ease of international travel, the potential for pandemics to spread quickly and widely is greater than ever before. H1N1, commonly referred to as the swine flu, has proven relatively mild in terms of severity, but has spread faster than any previously known influ-enza. Envision an influenza with high mortality, such as Avian Flu, spreading at this speed. Tackling pandemics effectively requires four things: good science, good business, international coopera-tion, and public awareness.
Water Scarcity: Water is required for life, livelihoods and pros-perity. Its variability, both in the absence and presence of water, already poses a substantial threat to 40 per cent of the global population. The absence of reliable water is killing millions of peo-ple per year, threatening food security, disrupting energy supply, restricting trade, creating refugees, and undermining authority. The presence of too much water is a cause of death, poverty, and
devastation through floods and landslides. If business-as-usual water resource management continues, the global water demand and supply gap is projected to be 40 per cent by 2030, given the projected population and economic growth. Climate variability will only exacerbate the problem further.
Nuclear Proliferation: Nuclear weapons retain the dubious distinction of being the fastest way ever devised to kill the most people. The threat of such weapons has been compelling enough to drive a series of international agreements banning the develop-ment of nuclear capabilities. Only nine countries are believed to currently have nuclear weapons capabilities. Yet these weapons – because of the power they are perceived to convey – continue to attract political attention. Iran, with its push to develop fuel-pro-cessing capabilities for what it claims are ‘peaceful nuclear power purposes’ and what the world believes is for creating nuclear weapons – raises alarms around the globe. The concern is that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists – for whom killing large numbers of people is generally a stated goal.
Middle East Conflict: The Arab Spring raised hopes that a new era of positive change may be emerging in the Middle East. However, there also exists an unusually high risk of conflict and instability, as the Iranian nuclear crisis remains unresolved, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict enters a new and uncertain phase after the collapse of the peace process, and revolutions and uprisings portend prolonged internal disorder, rapid foreign policy realignments and the disin-tegration of the regional security order. In the longer-term, chronic socioeconomic problems related to youth unemployment and food and water insecurity, exacerbated by climate change, will continue to challenge even the most stable regimes. Addressing these threats will require action on multiple fronts, none more important than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains the most likely trigger for large-scale regional conflict.
After delivering a baby girl, I was airlifted off the island by the Coast Guard and landed back in San Francisco. It seemed like every TV station in the world had their cameras in my face, all of them asking, “What do the Indians want?” Of course, I didn’t know the answer, but my picture was on TV , and I got a call the very next day from Warner Brothers asking if I would play the role of a young doctor in a movie. They said they would give me money to start a medical centre on Alcatraz, so I agreed.
For the next few months, my wife and I lived on a bus that travelled from San Francisco to London, and we made a movie,
Medicine Ball Caravan, about rock and roll bands featuring the
Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull;the shoot ended with a Pink Floyd concert in Canterbury, England.
We really liked living on a bus and being hippies, so a group of us decided to buy two buses and drive them from London to Katmandu. This took two years, and it was an amazing voyage. Along the way, we heard about an Indian guru named Karoli Baba who was Ram Dass’s guru and had written books about him. My wife Girija and I went up and lived with him for about two and a half years at his ashram in the Himalayas. Ram Dass, Danny Goleman, Steve Jobs and other seekers were there, and they became life-long friends of mine.
One day, my guru said to me, “It’s time for you to go find your destiny by working for the World Health Organization (WHO) to help eradicate smallpox.” I had never thought of doing that. I travelled down to the WHO office in New Delhi. At the time, I
Rotman Magazine Spring 2012 / 13 had long hair down to the middle of my back and a beard down to
my belly, and they kicked me out immediately. I returned to the ashram and my guru asked, “Did you get the job?” When I said no, he sent me back down. I went back 15 or 16 times, each time trimming my beard, and the last time I went in I had borrowed somebody’s ill-fitting suit. Finally, they hired me.
I started off as the mascot on the smallpox-eradication team; they basically hired me because I spoke Hindi and I could type. I don’t think they even remembered that I was a doctor until I had been there about six months. I wound up staying with the WHO for 10 years: I was the second or third person on the Asian region-al smregion-allpox eradication team, and I turned off the lights when we were done, so I saw the whole program unfold.
In the 20th century, 500 million people died of this disease, so not surprisingly, everyone told us, “This is impossible; you can’t eradicate smallpox.” But over a 20-month period, we made over one billion house calls, visiting every single house in India once per month to put a ring of immunity around each person with a vaccination. Of course, I was just one person in a growing army – the organization had grown to 150,000 people by then. We had 500 doctors from 35 countries working with us, includ-ing Russians and Americans; this was right in the middle of the Cold War, but as Dr. King had said, ‘we’re all in this together’. Instead of fighting against each other, we fought against a com-mon decom-mon.
After you’ve seen hundreds of thousands of children die and rivers that won’t run because of all the dead bodies in them, you have truly seen the horror of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But then one day, smallpox was conquered: it didn’t exist anymore. How could a person not be optimistic after that?
The Skoll Global Threats Fund is tackling five key global prob-lems (see sidebar). What is the ‘wickedest’ one you are cur-rently working on?
I would have to say that climate change and the Middle East are at the top of the list. The Middle East is the more urgent problem, while climate change is the gravest systemic challenge. The Arab Spring has raised hopes that a new era of positive change may be emerging in the Middle East. However, there also exists an un-usually-high risk of conflict and instability, as the Iranian nuclear crisis remains unresolved, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict enters a new and uncertain phase after the collapse of the peace process, and revolutions and uprisings portend prolonged internal disor-der, rapid foreign policy realignments and the disintegration of the regional security order.
In the longer-term, chronic socioeconomic problems re-lated to youth unemployment and food and water insecurity, exacerbated by climate change, will continue to challenge even the most stable regimes. Addressing these threats will require action on multiple fronts, none more important than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains the most likely trigger for
large-scale regional conflict. Basically, we’ve got two peoples who both, in their minds, own the same piece of land. The Is-raelis were given that piece of land by people who didn’t own it [the British, Europeans and United Nations]. The politics and the ethnic, religious, racial and geographic tensions and the way they spill over into the rest of the world make the Middle East our biggest wicked problem, although climate change is a very close second.
I approach the Middle East with what I’ve learned in the past about peaceful, non-violent resistance, and fostering the spirit that we really are ‘all in it together’. I look for the things that all sides have in common. In dealing with the Israelis, we’ve agreed that we all want a democratic, secular, transparent and honour-able government; and when dealing with the Palestinians, the message is that true change can only occur through non-violent, peaceful protest. It doesn’t mean that you accept the situation, but you have to agree to non-violent protest. That doesn’t mean it can’t be powerful.
Basically, I am trying to put to use all the lessons I learned in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War movement and the smallpox campaign. They have a major element in common: in each case, it’s about building a national movement and a large-scale program.
You have said that, “Our system is breaking at the seams, and our fixes have got to be as systemic as our problems.” What do systemic fixes look like?
All the things we depend upon – our economic system, religious involvement in daily life and global governance – are broken. To fix them, we have to deal with them at a different level. Al-bert Einstein said that the problems we have created cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness they were created at; they have to be solved at a higher level of thinking. You have to go to the very highest level you can think of – which is a change in global governance.
The institutions we put in place after the Second World War – Bretton Woods, the UN Security Council, the World Bank – are no longer working, and neither is our narrow definition of capitalism. We all agree that we need to have a vital and vibrant economy that creates jobs and economic prosperity, and capital-ism does that better than any other system; but where in the ‘rule book’ does it say that a corporation is allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to manipulate a political race so that it can create a congress or a senate that votes for things that enhance its profits? We’ve added all these things on to capitalism and we’ve held it up as an idol. I tell my friends that I’m less worried about the Second Amendment than the Second Commandment – “do not create a false idol and worship it.”
Economist Larry Summers once said that Macroeconomics can solve all the problems in the world except for two: externali-ties and market failures. And I would argue that all of the global
14 / Rotman Magazine Spring 2012
threats we are dealing with are derivatives of externalities and market failures.
You recently said that “what the world needs is a moral move-ment.” Please explain what you meant.
If you take a look at the global threats we’re facing, some of them are actually existential threats to human civilization. Not on the order of a massive meteor crashing into the earth, but they defi-nitely threaten civilization as we know it. Certainly, a pandemic that kills 400 million people would eliminate world commerce; no planes would be in the sky for months, not to mention deal-ing with the rampant death and despair. It would totally change civilization, which makes it an existential risk. The same goes for a nuclear bomb exploded in anger, the effects of climate change and water shortages and the threats posed by the Middle East.
If these are all existential threats, my questions is, Where are the voices of morality, ethics and religion? Why aren’t these things being discussed in churches and synagogues and mosques every week? What does it mean to be a religion if you are ignoring existential threats to civilization? It means that you are not pay-ing attention, and in my view, you are misspay-ing a callpay-ing to help the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us.
In an ideal world, how would you like to involve Wall Street and Bay Street in the work on wicked problems?
That is actually one of the things that makes me optimistic. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on Bay Street, but in the Sili-con Valley, our billionaires are very different from those on Wall Street. It’s part of the culture here to get involved in philanthropy and wicked problems. It’s not that every time somebody takes a company public in the Silicon Valley, they automatically get an injection of ‘we’re all in this together’; but just as in some com-munities, you’re not a member of the elite unless you fund an art museum, out here you’re not a fully realized success unless you are engaged in the big problems of the day.
Entrepreneurs who have made a billion dollars and are to-tally uninvolved in the great issues of the day are the exception in the tech community, not the rule, and that makes me optimistic. I am blown away by the people I get to deal with – people like [Uni-versity of Toronto graduate] Jeff Skoll (BASc ‘87, Hon LLD ‘03), Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Benioff, John Doerr, Richard Bran-son, Mark Zuckerberg and my dear friend, the late Steve Jobs. These people might fight with each other about business issues, but they are great people. Without exception, they are looking at big issues, and that makes me optimistic that philanthropy will change, and will be improved by the skill set – if not the resources – that this new cohort of ‘wealthians’ brings to bear.
What is your greatest worry going forward?
The stakes are so high now that it isn’t just about one small ca-tastrophe in one part of the world anymore. Greece tried to fail alone, but it couldn’t. We will either succeed together as a civili-zation or we will fail together. Every time we point our policy at one crisis and we don’t take a step back to see where it fits in the overall trajectory, we make a big mistake. It isn’t a surprise what we have to do; the question is, will we do it?
Larry Brilliant is president and CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund. A physician, epidemiologist, technologist, author, and the former executive director of Google’s philanthropic arm, from 1973 to 1976 he participated in the successful World Health Organization smallpox eradication program. He has also worked for the WHO and UNICEF on polio eradication and blindness and volunteered as a physician during several disasters, including the Asian Tsunami and the Bihar Floods. Along with many friends, he funded the SEVA Foundation, an international NGO where projects have surgically restored sight to over three million people.
THE MISSION OF THE SKOLL GLOBAL THREATS FUND
What we mean by global threats
Global threats have the potential to kill or debilitate very large numbers of people or cause significant economic or social dislocation or paralysis throughout the world. These threats cannot be solved by any one country; they require some sort of a collective response. Global threats are often non-linear, and are likely to become exponentially more difficult to manage if we don’t begin making serious strides in the right direction in the next 5-10 years.
Cross-cutting focus
We believe global threats share causes, challenges and potentially, cures. We primarily seek to identify and address complex challenges common to multiple global threats. Cross-cutting areas that we believe could help society manage these threats include:
• Communication: Promote better understanding of uncertainty and risk at every level of discourse, public to political.
• Governance: Develop more competent governance, includ-ing both formal functioninclud-ing structures as well as formal and informal networks.
• Engagement: Create new coalitions and facilitate better coordination of actors of all kinds across multiple sectors, with a special focus on ‘strange bedfellows’.
• Information: Enable access to and promote transparency in data, processes, and financial flows around global threats to facilitate informed decision making.
• Innovation: Promote innovations in models, technology and approaches (including incentivizing for long-term thinking).
Our approach
We work proactively to find, initiate, or co-create breakthrough ideas and/or activities that we believe will have large-scale impact, either directly or indirectly, and whether on cross-cutting issues or individual threats.
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