Interviews
Exquisitely Interconnected: An Interview with David Suzuki
Caroline Van Hemert and Elizabeth Colen
David Suzuki visited Bellingham in December of 2004 to read from his newest book Tree: A Life Story. We had the opportunity to meet with Suzuki at the Koi Café prior to his presentation to a packed house at the Bellingham High School. Suzuki, a renowned geneticist turned author and broadcaster, writes with the observant, critical eye of a naturalist about our relationship to science and the environment. Tree tracks the life history of a single Douglas fir, a coniferous giant common among our Pacific Northwest forests. Beginning from the botanical microcosm of a tree’s intricacies, Suzuki and co-author Wayne Grady transport readers through a vividly rendered view of the extensive, complex web we call home.
Surrounded by the vines of carefully tended houseplants and aromas emanating from the flower shop next door, we welcomed Suzuki to downtown Bellingham, just a short journey from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. Well-versed in the recording technologies of television and radio, Suzuki raised an expressive eyebrow as we introduced ourselves and our equipment. His unmistakable humor arose immediately, sending us all into laughter at the skeptical reaction to our tiny, archaic tape recorder. Decidedly technologically unsavvy, we settled into a table facing out onto State Street to discuss Tree, the history of science, and the “exquisite interconnections” between our natural and social worlds.
Elizabeth Colen: What was it like when you did your first interview? I know you’ve been in broadcasting for quite some time.
David Suzuki: I can’t even remember that. The first television program I ever did was in 1962, so it’s been a long time. The thing I found for television was that most scientists get really uptight when you turn on the camera and I guess I’m such a ham that I didn’t find it frightening or intimidating. I just kind of took to it. My dad, you see, had trained me to be a public speaker. He was always annoyed that Japanese-Canadians are so shy. And he said to me, “You’ve got to be a speaker.”
Caroline Van Hemert: What was your father’s background?
DS: He just finished high school, an ordinary guy, but he was born in Canada and always felt that the Japanese were too reticent and shy.
EC: And you got a lot of your interest in the environment and nature from him?
DS: He was my great mentor, yes. I used to call him my mutant because his parents had come from Japan. Their only interest was making money and going back to Japan. But of course he was born here and he said, “I’m not going to go to Japan, it’s a foreign country, I’m staying here.” But the whole thrust of his parents was to make money, buy a house, etcetera, and he was totally uninterested in money. He loved gardening, he loved trees—he had a garden full of wild trees—and he loved fishing. So I used to say, “Dad, you’re a mutant, you’re just a weird guy.” Because I don’t know where he got it.
EC: I guess we can start off by talking about the new book, which is absolutely fantastic.
DS: Oh good, thank you.
EC: It’s especially good for me because I don’t have a background in the sciences, unlike Caroline, and I found it absolutely engaging and intriguing. How has it been received so far?
DS: Well it’s rocketed right up. It’s on the top ten bestseller list in Canada. And apparently it’s on the Amazon.ca, the Canadian list of the top 100, so it’s doing well.
CV: Have you noticed a different reception to this one versus some of the earlier publications?
DS: People are intrigued. I don’t know whether it’s the same audience. The audience I’d carved out previously has been used to me saying, “The sky is falling, we’re in deep trouble.” But my book prior to this one was called Good News for a Change. And that was all about the good news stories around the world that are going on now. People were kind of shocked at that because they thought, “you enviros, you’re always saying doom and gloom.” So now to come out with a tree, they’re going, “What the hell are you doing? Who cares about a single tree?” But the fact is, we take them for granted. We’re fighting to save forests, and yet we don’t think anything of an individual tree, especially in the city. If we’re going to build a house, we just go in there and cut a tree down without a thought. And so what I wanted was a book where you read it and go “Holy, I didn’t know that!” That’s the impression I hope readers come away with.
EC: I’m interested in how you go about making this sort of thing accessible to lay people like me. What sort of editing process is involved?
DS: First of all, Wayne Grady, my coauthor, is a nature writer. I had this book idea about ten years ago and I started to accumulate a tremendous amount of information. I hired a researcher to gather stuff, like how many needles on the tree and all sorts of facts. And then I had a big shelf of books, and the publisher kept saying this is going to be a big seller, please do it, do it, do it. And I realized that my life was so hectic I couldn’t sit down to work through all the research. So I said, I know what I want the book to be, but I need someone to go through this material. And Wayne came on board, and Wayne is a very eminent writer in his own right. And he was able to organize it and help work the pieces together. He writes for a lay audience anyway, he’s not a scientist. And the way I think about all my writing or television, is through the eyes of my father. Because my father was my biggest fan, but he was also my biggest critic. If he saw a show I did that he couldn’t understand he would call me up and ball me out and say, “You are my son and I love you, I’m on your side. If I don’t understand, how do you think anybody else will?” And he’d just give me hell. So, whether it’s my writing or the other media, I’m always thinking of my dad. If my dad gets it, then great.
EC: Even after all this time…
DS: My dad is there.
EC: What’s it like actually working with another writer? It seems like such a strangely intimate thing. How did the drafting of chapters go?
DS: The way that one worked is that I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and the sequence. Throughout the process, I wanted to include more science, and Wayne kept reminding me that the science was too heavy. For example, I wanted to go into photosynthesis because I think photosynthesis is just a miracle, but it would have been very, very difficult to do. And we spent a couple of days together going over the sequence, and I’d say “I’d like to have this stuff in here.” Then he started to write. He went through all the stuff, organized it, and then it came back to me. Then I basically said, “Look, you left out this,” and rewrote or wrote whole sections. So it really was a true collaboration. And we went through about five drafts together. I’ve co-authored many other books and usually the way it works is that it’s based on a television or radio series we’ve done together. Each co-author was also a researcher. So we knew what the show was, and had a good sense of what the book would look like, basically, those, I’d let them do most of the writing. But this one I feel I really co-wrote. I did a lot of writing of my own.
EC: It’s a beautiful book.
CV: One point that came up that I thought was really interesting was writing to restore or to inspire in the layperson a sense of wonder. And I’ve found, being involved in science and biology, that wonder is something we’re often asked to put aside. What is your relationship to this issue?
DS: I’m glad you asked that, because the biggest biology course we teach is introductory biology, and I think there are three thousand students enrolled in each class. These kids are pumped through there like an assembly line. It’s a massive course, in many, many different lab sections. And by the time the students get through two semesters their eyes are just spinning like this, and they’ve got like fifty thousand names and terms, but they don’t come out of it going “Oh, my God, life is amazing!” It’s all about focusing and trying to memorize tons of detail. And I keep saying to my colleagues, “What the hell’s wrong with you? The vast majority of these kids are never going to go into biology and yet you’re teaching them biology as if you’re training them all to be biologists.” What you want them to do is have an appreciation for just what a miracle the complexities of life are. And that’s all you need to do. For the kids who want to go and become doctors or scientists, they’ll go on, they’ll go into it in more detail. So I’m very, very critical of the way most introductory biology courses are taught, because they lose the sense of wonder and awe. In Tree, that’s what I really wanted to convey. You look at a single tree and you realize “Wow, it connects us to the universe.” Everything is connected through time and space, and if you get that who cares about all the fine details. You’ve got the “gist” of it.
CV: The big concepts, yes. Have you been involved at all in interdisciplinary programs?
DS: I taught, for years, after it became clear that I was going to stop doing research. At one time I had the largest genetics lab and research group in the country. But I became more and more concerned about the direction that biotechnology was going and decided I wanted to remain a discussant in the social implications of genetic engineering. If my lab was heavily involved in doing this kind of work, then I felt like a scientist working for the tobacco industry. How could I have credibility if my lab was already doing this stuff? So I gave up doing research for a while. First, I said, “I’m not going to do any biotechnology,” but then I gave up my grant and said “I now want to remain a credible discussant in the area.” At that point, I stopped teaching introductory genetics, and I taught a course on human evolution and genetics, which was the science requirement for non-science students who were interested in it. And it was a wonderful course. The kids were great and the thing I loved about it was that we didn’t get bogged down on the details. Although they wanted to go into what exactly is genetic engineering and we’d delve deeper into certain things that seemed significant. Every night we’d go to the pub and we’d talk about the big picture, “What are the implications of this?” I loved that course. I would also love to teach introductory biology. But I know that to do that well it would take me two years of just sitting down and really studying. Because I would teach it in a way that no one has ever done before.
CV: I often wonder within science just how necessary these distinctions between fields and between discussants/participants really are. We demand that scientific critique must happen from outside the field, but little responsibility is placed on scientific communities themselves. Don’t we need more conversation within and between science and society?
DS: I think that’s an absolutely crucial question. We’re training a tremendous number of very specialized people. But in terms of the kinds of questions I’m interested in, such as “What is the history of genetics?,” scientists are not informed. If you look at the history…you know, Joseph Mengele was at Auschwitz. He was a geneticist. He was getting two peer reviewed grants to do studies on twins at Auschwitz. They were slaughtering Jews, and here’s this scientist saying “Oh, I’m interested in heredity and eye color.”
CV: And the whole eugenics movement, for example, is often forgotten in discussions of genetics.
DS: Exactly. And yet we don’t teach our geneticists any of that. Kids come out of a PhD in genetics and they’ve never had the history of genetics. So the minute you start criticizing geneticists who are set up with their own biotech company and all that, they get really angry. They say, “Well, you’re not a geneticist anymore, how can you criticize us?” And they feel that as long as you tell people how great biotechnology is, that’s the extent of their responsibility. But when you say, “Wait a minute now, those possibilities are conjectural just in the same way that the possible hazards are. And yet you act as if the good things are real, and the hazards are improbable,” the industry goes up in arms.
CV: They exist in a social realm that is supposed to be ignored or dismissed as irrelevant to the real work of science.
DS: Yes, what’s going on here? I think that we’re training a group of savages, who are very very well-trained to use these very powerful technologies, but they are savages, because they’ve had no history, they’ve had no philosophy, they’ve had no religion, they’ve had no literature, they know nothing about the social context within which these powerful technologies are going to be applied.
CV: As an undergrad I was a student in biology, and I was also in a women’s studies department. I always felt like I was switching worlds, from one program to the next, and there was absolutely no dialogue at all.
DS: You see, I went to college in the fifties, and it was an all male college, Amherst College in Massachusetts. And in those days you could only graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree. And although I did an honors degree in biology, I was never allowed to take, even in my senior year, more than half of my courses in science. So well over fifty percent of all the courses I took in four years at Amherst were in the humanities. And I’m telling you, they held me in very good stead. And yet, it didn’t hold me back, because I got my PhD in less than three years after my bachelor’s. I wrote a genetics text that I gather is now the most widely used genetics textbook in the world, called An Introduction to Genetic Analysis. When we first wrote that in 1976, I said “Look Tony, let’s only deal with the basic principles that are not going to change much, so that way, we’ll write the textbook, and we won’t have to revise it except maybe once every ten or fifteen years.” Well, that was ’76 and it rocketed up and became a very widely used text in North America. And the next thing you know, after a couple of years of publishers saying “Look, this is getting out of date, you’ve gotta update it,” it’s now in its 8th edition, and it’s grown totally encyclopedic. I keep saying, “But these students are going to learn all this stuff, or try to, and in another five years it’s going to be wrong.” The whole point about science, is in a cutting edge area like genetics, most of your current ideas are wrong. That’s not a knock on science, it’s the way science progresses. You show your current ideas are wrong by doing more experiments and modifying them. And I think most of biology has got caught up in the idea “We gotta tell the kids about the latest stuff” and we forget that most of that is going to be irrelevant by the time they get to PhDs.
EC: This is sort of related. In your autobiography, Metamorphisis…
DS: You’ve really done your homework!
EC: Well, I do a lot of reading. You say that you’ve “gone from being a full-time research scientist to being a full-time broadcaster, and that the shift has created [your] greatest personal pangs, that everything in you itches to continue publishing scientific papers. And that was twenty or so years ago. I was wondering if you still had any anxiety of that sort.
DS: Well, not so much pangs anymore, but I can tell you, anytime I’m invited to write an article for a scientific journal I am so thrilled. I write a weekly column which we give away free all across Canada. So in terms of publications I’ve got a huge list of papers, but I was asked by Science to write an editorial about two international conferences on forestry. I was absolutely thrilled. And then I was asked a couple of years ago to write an article about eugenics, and I’m so proud of that, because the scientist in me still wants to appeal to my colleagues. Even though I’m now taking a position that many scientists don’t like, I still feel that I’m a scientist. And you know, when you’re trained as a scientist, you’re taught to believe that the best indication of your output is a paper. So the minute you stop publishing you’re kind of considered over-the-hill. You may have a Nobel Prize, but the minute you stop publishing, oh yea, well he’s gone senile or whatever. I realize in the male-dominated area of science, publication and having a big research grant is a phallus. The bigger the grant the more macho stud you are. And that’s why all these guys who become deans and presidents of universities still insist on having their research labs. They say, “Oh, I love science so much I’m not going to give it up.” But often that is bullshit. They still want to be a big macho male. And I keep saying “Look, you’re president of a university, that’s a full time job, what are you doing being a scientist?” But it’s that whole macho thing, that my peer group will only respect me if I’m still publishing, with a big grant. That’s been very hard to give up.
CV: It’s interesting that you bring up wanting to still relate to colleagues and that sort of thing. It seems that to take on the position of being an effective science critic you almost have to have a background in science to establish the sort of authority that is required. And that is something that’s tricky to navigate because it’s a matter of being both inside and outside the discourse.
DS: It is. There are very few scientists who will actually give up a full-time career in science to become essentially a critic, or a commentator. And you know, you look at Carl Sagan. Carl was an eminent scientist in his own right, but he was never elected to the National Academy of Science, and the reason is, everybody hated his guts, because he was a popularizer of science, it was a vulgar activity, and he was incredibly good at it. He should have made the national academy just as a science popularizer. So it’s a very difficult role to play. Margaret Mead was criticized. Paul Ehrlich was criticized. The scientists don’t like that interface between science and society.
CV: And those are the scientists who are remembered by people who don’t have background in science.
DS: Of course. I think they are real heroes. Because often it came at high stakes. I think of Rachel Carson, who is my biggest hero. Rachel Carson didn’t get a PhD because back then it was considered a waste of time to educate a woman. They weren’t going to be scientists. So she had a master’s degree. To me she was a scientist, and yet she was vilified by the scientific community because she dared to suggest that pesticides were bad.
EC: I think even the AMA, the American Medical Association, got on her about that.
DS: I don’t know about that criticism, but I know that the chemical companies had lots of scientists working for them, who called her a hysterical old maid because she’d never been married. They said she’s not a scientist; she’s being too emotional. They drew on all the criticisms that allowed them not to deal with the issues she was raising, which is the evidence that pesticides were killing birds and fish. It was terrible—she died two years after she published Silent Spring.
CV: What do you think it would take to have a contemporary piece of literature raise awareness like Silent Spring? Would there need to be an immediate issue to focus on for a publication to be as effective as that book was?
DS: Well, the world is a very different place now. It’s hard to imagine the impact of Silent Spring today. In 1962 when Silent Spring came out, there wasn’t a single environmental department in any country in the world. The environment was not an issue. If you said environment back then, they wouldn’t have thought about ecological problems. So she put it on the map. Now it just, boom, exploded, and we got clean air acts, and clean water acts, and endangered species. All that stuff happened as a result. And now what you’ve got is just a whole huge number of issues, whether its forestry, fisheries, climate change, there are so many issues now. It’s hard to wade through all of the specialized concerns and people feel assaulted by competing crises. It’s very hard to carve out a place. I’ve tried to point out, “Look, those are all symptoms, but there’s an underlying root cause of our destructiveness,” so then we can focus on ways to try to shift our behavior. But it’s very, very hard to do.
CV: I noticed in Tree there are a number of places where you make a connection from the Doug Fir to human sorts of behaviors. In these places, we can directly relate ourselves to the tree, whether it’s plant sex being similar to human sex or something along those lines. Do you find that to be one of the easier ways to get people to realize that the environment does have some connection to their own lives?
DS: I don’t know. I can tell you that we worked for ten years on climate, and for the first few years we got absolutely no lift at all. We were trying to explain that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses form a blanket and trap pollution, just the physical aspects of what climate change is all about. We got no interest. And then we found out that the government had data showing that sixteen thousand Canadians were dying every year from air pollution. So we said, “Let’s forget about climate change, air pollution is caused by burning fossil fuel. Let’s focus on health problems as a result of burning fossil fuel.” Instantly, huge response. So when it’s tied directly to people and their health, that seems to be the way. We have to be motivated out of self-interest. What I tried to do in the book was just give you a sense of “Life is amazing, I mean even that bloody tree is a miracle.” Thinking that that way you come to love nature in a different way. But I think the most effective way is still, “Can you tie that in to me somehow?”
CV: Yes, to make it matter to the individual. As you mentioned, there is a barrage of information that can be overwhelming. There’s almost too much out there for people to filter through and try to decide, o.k., how am I going to change my behavior to respond to all these things.
DS: Well, yes, and so what I’m saying is the biggest challenge we face in the environmental area is that people live in a world that is just shattered. It’s just these bits and pieces coming at you. So in a world that’s shattered you don’t see the interconnection. That was the power of Rachel Carson’s book. She illustrated that although you spray chemicals to kill insects, in the real world everything’s connected, so you end up affecting fish and birds and human beings. She brought all this information together and showed DDT was causing all these things. Well, scientists had no idea that was going to happen. So the whole point there is to remember that the world is exquisitely interconnected. At least that was the message I got. But now, through the internet, through television, through all of the publications, people’s worlds are shattered. And the most striking thing, which I’ll probably mention tonight, is that you’ll have people who are worried sick about their children and asthma, but are driving them around in an SUV. Well, those parents love their children and I’m sure they would do anything to save their children from all this crisis. But they would never put together the fact that their lifestyle and their choices are part of the problem they are trying to deal with. We’ve got to show that what happens to a Douglas Fir, or what happens to a song sparrow somewhere is directly related to me, in some way.
CV: And it seems particularly poignant in the political context that we’re in right now, in terms of interconnection with dramatic effects and reactions.
DS: Oh yes. As a scientist I’m absolutely outraged that you have a leader who on the one hand says, “Because of science we’re going to go to Mars and back,” which I don’t believe for a minute because I’ve been to Houston, I’ve seen the mock-up, and that’s a Kamikaze mission as far as I’m concerned. And he says through science we can build a space missile defense shield, which I guarantee will not work. But he believes in science with these sorts of technologies. But then you have all the climatologists that are saying we are going into climate change, and he says, “Bullshit, I don’t believe that.” So this is the terrible aspect, when you start using science selectively to support a political agenda, that’s really dangerous. And that’s what is happening now. As a scientist I am absolutely offended by this, and I tell my fellow scientists “We are failing big time. We are failing as scientists to communicate what is it about science that is special and why we should we be paid attention to. We are just not educating these guys.”
CV: What sort of advice would you have for someone who wants to begin bridging those gaps? What steps can we take?
DS: We all have to become scientifically literate. And I’m not even focused on the current politicians. We’ve got to focus on society so that society understands the really crucial issues that face us now in the 21st century are all related to science. They are about space research, they’re about stem cells, they’re about genetic engineering, cloning, they’re about nanotechnology, I mean you just go down the list. Climate change, deforestation, pollution, you can’t make informed decisions if you are not scientifically literate. Now we did a study in Ottawa, about twenty years ago now, I don’t think anything has changed, we found that 70% of politicians in Ottawa, so these would be like your Senators or Congressmen, come from two areas. They come from business and they come from law. I think the reason for this is that lawyers and business people can afford to run and lose; most of us can’t. And then we administered a very simple test of scientific terms, like atom, molecule, the water cycle, to fifty members of Parliament. And business people and lawyers scored absolutely rock bottom. They know squat, and yet they’re going to have to make decisions about space research and space defense missiles and artificial intelligence, and they know squat, and that’s why you get a president that uses science when it suits him. Because he’s scientifically illiterate. We need a public that demands that politicians, any politician, any party, can respond when asked, “What do you know about global warming? Are you worried about it? Can you read the IBCC report and come to a conclusion?” And if they can’t, we’ve got no business electing these people. So the challenge for me, and I’ve been failing at this for forty years now, is to raise the whole public’s awareness so they take these issues seriously and demand that politicians do the same. But we’re losing big time. I think that something like 40% of Americans believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found, 60% believe there is a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Quaida, but all the evidence against it is overwhelming. So this is terrifying. It’s not frustrating, it’s terrifying that these people, what the hell are they believing? I mean they’re all getting all their information from Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and these people.
EC: If they’re getting information at all.
CV: But information seems so widely available. That’s what I don’t understand, because the data are absolutely present.
DS: And look at the number of books that have come out from people that were in the Bush administration. I mean it’s just terrifying that none of that had any effect.
CV: That’s what makes me feel so discouraged by all of this. Where do we go next? The information is there and no one deals with it
DS: Exactly. See, I’m in the business of television, and I know it’s a part of the problem. We are just awash with all of this stuff. Even though we try to have a very strong biocentric bias, that we’re a part of nature and you’ve got to see the connections, overwhelmingly we’re part of a broadcast that is basically about buying stuff, commercials. Our programs may have power and a strong point of view, but all around it is, “buy more stuff.” So, I don’t know, we need people to care about information and realize they can’t make decisions about the future unless they are informed. People aren’t interested. Television gives it to you so easy, and people are willing to rely on that. I just read an article by a business man in the States about peak oil. Do you know what peak oil is? It’s been talked about for decades and peak oil is when you’ve identified virtually all of the major oil, and there’s no more to be found. Well, there are some geologists now who are saying we’ve already hit peak oil. That there are no more vast supplies remaining. And there are others saying it’s going to be within the next two to four years. Well, whatever it is we’re right at that peak. The implications of that are so staggering. First of all, what we’ve been living on is Alice in Wonderland stuff, Fairyland. Cheap gas. What do you pay for a gallon of gas?
CV: $2.15 here
DS: Should be at least ten bucks. Right now, nobody thinks anything about buying an SUV because gas is cheap. And everybody is quibbling, if the price goes up by ten cents people scream. There is no incentive to do the right things, we’re just wasting all this energy. When we get peak, and the decline comes in, oil prices are going to go through the roof. What does that mean? It means Walmart, Home Depot, all these things that depend on cheap Chinese goods or huge transportation collapse. And then the suburbs, which are all built on the necessity of cars with big houses; the cost of just heating a house like that will be impossible. Suburbs are going to collapse. Our whole food system is based on bringing food from all over the world. In Canada right now, all of our apples are shipped from New Zealand. All of that, see, it’s terrifying, and its going to happen in a very short period of time. And all of our so-called leaders, they’ve got advisers who know damn well we’re going to hit peak oil within a year or two, and they’re not doing anything. There is a businessman who said, “The whole economic system is going to collapse, and we’re all behaving like Jiminy Cricket. If you wish on a star…” It’s terrifying.
CV: Are a lot of these issues what you will be addressing in your talk tonight?
DS: No, I’m not going to talk about the peak oil collapse. The big thing I’m going to do is relate Tree to the fact that we’ve shattered the world. And I hope by focusing on one tree, showing how that connects us, people will draw the conclusion, “Oh my God, I’m in that world too, and I’m as dependent…” So that’s what my message is going to be. We’ve got to put the world back together.
CV: That is such a fabulous way to approach it because it draws on so many different aspects of human emotion and awareness. People’s relationships to trees, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where everywhere you go you see Doug Firs, are so present. But at the same time, most people don’t think twice about cutting them down. And literature offers such an important means of communicating ideas, of making the science approachable and making it matter.
DS: Yes, it’s a critical need. My youngest daughter is heading in that direction. She’s majoring in marine biology but she really wants to get into science writing. And I think there is a huge arena there and we need that group of people to get ordinary people to take science seriously.
EC: If there were more books like this I’d be quite drawn to science writing.
DS: I think a person could do very well to make a living in this field.
CV: That’s encouraging, since it’s what I’m most passionate about at the moment. I’m interested in trying to make links between conservation and society and being able to express it in a way that seems significant. So often science writing demands such specific focus that it becomes inaccessible to everyone but the experts of a particular field.
DS: There is a place for any and all science if it is communicated effectively. What I found on the Nature of Things is that you could do the sex life of an oyster, and if you wrote if properly people would be fascinated.
EC: Do you have any other books you are thinking about writing?
DS: I keep saying that I’ve got one more book in me. Twenty years after Metamorphosis and I’m just going to add the next twenty years. And it sounds like we’re going to publish it, I’m going to rewrite the first Metamorphosis I wrote and then just add the next twenty years which will be a lot of interesting stuff. I got very heavily involved with native people in South America and in Australia and places like that, so I can put all that material in. So hang around for two more years.