Environmentalists, Artists, Students & Teachers share their Love for the Planet

Today we’re streaming voices of environmentalists, artists, students, and teachers with music courtesy of composer Max Richter.

Explorer · Presenter · Author of Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

It's such a privilege swimming through these places. And I almost feel like I'm getting a secret peak into the body of the planet and that's a very precious and almost a sacred kind of collaboration where I get to experience this, I get to see this, but if I'm going to take these insanely challenging risks I need to make it worthwhile and share what I've seen so that other people have the benefit of understanding, a better conception of our connected planet. Both in the short term and in the long term scale as well. The sense of time can be warped by what's going on in my brain, so I do have this dance between left brain and right brain. Left brain pragmatic, right brain creative.

Founder & President of Global Footprint Network
Winner of the World Sustainability Award · IAIA Global Environment Award

So shooting for one planet just means you would be totally dominant, and leave no space for other species. Ecologists say to maintain 85% of preindustrial biodiversity, it would take about at least half the planet left on its own. That would mean getting to half-planet. And now we use at least 1.75. I say at least because our assessments with about 15,000 data points per country in a year are based on UN statistics, and their demand side is probably an underestimate because not all demands are included. And also on the supply side or the regeneration side, the UN is very production oriented, so it's the FAO numbers, for example, look at agricultural production, and the depletion side or the destruction side is not factored in adequately. So that's why it's an underestimate. And still, it shows we use about 1.75 Earths, and that's more than three times half an Earth. So that's kind of the difference. But we also know overshoot will end one way or another. The question is do we choose to end it? Do we choose it by design, or do we let nature take the lead and end overshoot by disaster? So it's really ending overshoot by design or disaster. That's the big choice we need to make.

Founding Father of the Circular Economy · Founder-Director of Product-Life Institute
Author of The Circular Economy: A User’s Guide.

The circularity, of course, has existed in nature for a long time. Actually, nature's circularity is by evolution. There is no plan, there is no liability, and there are no preferences. It's simply the cycles such as marine tides, CO2, and water cycles, plants and animals, and basically by evolution, the best solution wins. Also, there is no waste. Dead material becomes food for other animals or plants. Now, early mankind survived by depending on these local natural resources sharing a non-monetary chaotic symbiosis dominated by nature, then poverty or necessity-based society changed when humankind used science to overcome shortages of everything. In other words, the Anthropocene. With nuclear energy, petrochemicals, metal alloys, we became independent from nature, but we overlooked the fact that these new manmade anthropogenic resources or synthetic resources were unknown to nature, so nature could not deal with them. And that means that we, humankind, has to take responsibility for it.

President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

If we’re badly educated, we’re not going to make it on this planet. If I had to put my finger on one Sustainable Development Goal above all else, it is let’s empower young people so that they know the future. They know the world that they’re going to be leading soon. They can do something about it…If you’re in elementary school up to university, you should be learning–What is climate change? What is biodiversity? What can we do about it? And this kind of learning is not only book learning, but is also experiential learning.

Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy

She is responsible for Just Transition, Consumers, Energy Efficiency, Innovation and Energy security. She has been previously Head of Unit at the Directorate-General Energy in the European Commission. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations, financial instruments and inter-institutional relations.

Nobel Prize-winning Climate Scientist · Lead Author of IPCC Assessment Reports
Author of The Changing Flow of Energy Through the Climate System

This is an intergenerational problem. The response to climate change relates very much to value systems. And one of the questions people ask, or should ask is: How much do you value the future generations? How much do you value the world that you're leaving your children and your grandchildren? And what kind of a climate you're leaving them with? And some people don't care, and some people don't have children. And they say, "Eh, it's not an issue for me. It's not one of my values." And so this is part of the problem, but if you're thinking about peoples as a whole, all of the community that you're leaving behind, this is a collective problem.

Dakota & Yaqui Writer, Health Advocate · Co-Chair, UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus
Founder of Translations for our Nations · Co-founder Ohiyesa Premedical Program

My mom and my dad would often go to protests. They would organize movements. They'd be part of multilateral indigenous people's movements, not only nationally, but internationally, that were operating at the grassroots level. Activism, it’s a tradition in my family for indigenous rights. I have aunts and uncles that were very involved as well. So as a kid, I was often at those protests. I was running around as a little Native kid with all the other little Native kids, when our parents would be in meetings discussing how to move forward discussing indigenous rights.

Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington · MacArthur Fellow ’08
Co-author of What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health · The Hidden Half of Nature

When you dig into the medical literature, 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States are diet-related chronic diseases. And so one of the hopeful messages that I think comes out of The Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, and What Your Food Ate is that what we do to the land, essentially we do to us. And what's good for the land is good for us. So if we think about farming differently, we can actually enjoy ripple effects that are not only beneficial to the farmers in terms of reduced costs for fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel, but it could also translate into better human health outcomes at a population level.

Leader in Sustainable Design & Development
Architect, Co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I think believing in something is also part of the responsibility of the believer to sift through these things. So there are a lot of people saying I'm green because they do something less badly. So for me, it’s not green yet, it's just less bad. It's not really good yet. It's not really fabulous, but that just means there's an opportunity to keep going to share information and help each other because in the end, I think what we're dealing with now is the recognition that the world has a very serious issue with climate, that's very clear now. So how can we help each other? The question is no longer what is wrong with the way you're doing it. The real question now is how can I help you?

Fmr. Minister of Environment, Ecuador
Fmr. President: WWF Int’l, World Conservation Union, Founder Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano

One of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific knowledge to become popular language that I can use when explaining to a child, to a rural person, to someone who has a different type of education, that knows much more about the planet but not necessarily about university, explaining those difficult issues will make a difference. And we have to invest much more in that. Speaking difficult scientific language is not helpful to the majority of society.

Most Influential Living Philosopher
Author · Founder of The Life You Can Save

I would like young people to recognise that they are part of a long tradition that has been trying to the make the world a better place. A tradition that goes back as far as we have recorded history, that there are people who tried to–like Socrates, but also like Buddha and many other figures in different cultures–think more about how we ought to live in accordance with their thinking. Tried to do good in the world and that’s a tradition they can be part of. This generation really does hold the future of the planet in its hands.

Psychiatrist, Explorer, Aviator of the First Round-the-World Solar-powered Flight
Founder and Chairman of Solar Impulse Foundation: 1000+ Profitable Climate Solutions
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment

So this is why I prefer to speak with a really down to earth language. So maybe the people who love nature are going to say, “Oh, Bertrand Piccard, now he is too down to earth. He's speaking about profitable solutions. He's speaking to the industries that are polluting,” but we have to speak to the industries that are polluting and bring them profitable solutions, otherwise the world will never change, or humankind will never change. And don't forget one thing, what we are damaging is not the beauty of nature. What is being damaged is the quality of life of human beings on Earth because we can still have beautiful things to see, but if we have climate change, if we have tropical disease in Europe, if we have heat waves, floods, droughts, millions of climate refugees, life will be miserable, even if nature is still beautiful.

Fmr. Executive Director of Greenpeace International
Special Envoy for International Climate Action · German Foreign Ministry

I have always hoped and dreamt to work with young people because I’ve always felt that it is their future. It’s so inspiring to be working with young people all around the world. I feel that we are in the midst of transformational change and that working together around these key moments where you can see those shifts happening – unimaginable things that you never thought were going to happen can happen. That would be my other advice to young activists that just when you aren’t expecting it, something will happen and you’ll be like, “I can’t believe they just decided that! Holy cow!” And then you’ve got to celebrate.

Icelandic Writer & Documentary Filmmaker
On Time and Water · The Casket of Time · LoveStar · Not Ok · The Story of the Blue Planet

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

If you look at the Himalayas, the frozen glaciers are feeding 1 billion people with milky white water. The real tragedy is if the Himalayan glaciers go the same way as Iceland. In many places in the world, glaciers are very important for agriculture and the basic water supply of people.

Author of The Inland Sea
Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University

I was reading ecological history and also reading about violence against women and how violence perpetuates itself over many generations. And there was something about this European sort of supremacy of ideas about nature, their ideas about rationality, all of this stuff that sort of came from the Enlightenment. John Oxley's diaries made no mention of the Indigenous Australians who were at the time subject to genocide. So I was interested in these ideas about how they tried to tame the land, which is often talked about as "a woman" and the way that the kind of violence that comes from a particular kind of European colonial project that is enacted on the land intertwines with the way that violence is enacted upon women. And it was something that I felt growing up in Australia.

UN Climate Advisor · Activist & Educator
Founder of Kids4abetterworld

Sagarika Sriram is currently a student at Jumeirah College in Dubai. She founded the organization Kids4abetterworld when she was 10 years old with a mission to educate and encourage young children to lead a more sustainable life and reduce their carbon footprint. Children are the worst affected by the effects of climate change,  yet most children do not participate in climate change discussions or take actions to live more sustainably because they do not have the awareness and capability to do so. Kids4abetterworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability aiming to Educate, Motivate and Activate young children to  conserve natural resources, protect biodiversity, and positively  impact climate change. As a UN Climate Advisor, she has participated in the global consultations that will ensure children are made aware of their environmental rights and that UN member states protect and uphold these.

Author of The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements
Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego · Climate Activist

Psychology has something to tell us about why so few people are really engaged in the climate struggle. There are different components to this. First of all, there is what I call epistemic skepticism in the book, which is to say, skepticism about the facts of climate change. The second thing is threat perception, that threat levels are not as high as they should be. And the third is that people are skeptical about the response. They don't think that they can do anything, or they don't believe that groups or even countries can make a difference. Epistemic skepticism: psychologically this means that quite a lot of people, for example, the United States, don't believe in the human cause of heating. And the reason for that is very much to do in fact, with the systematic campaign of misinformation that's been fostered by the fossils industry, systematically set out to confuse people about the scientific consensus. We should be very threatened by this. In fact, the youth, generally speaking, are anxious to some extent about it. In effect, Mother Earth is saying, "I can't deal with what you're doing to me, people. I'm putting up my temperature." And if you're not feeling anxious, then you're not paying attention. That's the right way to feel on Planet Earth.

Author of Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket 2024) · Extinction: A Radical History · People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons · Professor of English at the Graduate Center / CUNY and the College of Staten Island

The message is that indigenous sovereignty is connected to the preservation of biodiversity. And right now the statistics are really shocking on so-called protected areas, which currently constitute 17% of the planet. And the goal coming out of that Montreal conference for the biodiversity crisis last autumn is to roughly double that amount of protected areas, right? So the slogan was 30 by 30. 30% of the planet in protected area status by 2030. So we're really talking about massive expansion of protected areas. But within protected areas themselves, according to recent reports, only about 1% of the land actually has indigenous sovereignty. There are other arrangements like co-management, for instance, or indigenous people who are kind of encouraged to see their claims to conservation organizations with the guarantee that it will be protected and they'll have access of some kind. But, you know, as some of the indigenous activists who appeared at this conference and who are in the Decolonize Conservation! book said, they don't like the idea of co-management because it's essentially colonialism. They want control of their land.

Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science & Affiliated Professor · Earth & Planetary Sciences · Harvard University
Co-author of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government & Love the Free Market

I think the word consortium is a good word. It's not a conspiracy, although at times it takes on conspiratorial elements, but it's a kind of network or consortium of people who are working over a very long period of time, going back to the early 20th century to build an ideology that basically says we should trust the marketplace. That markets are not merely an efficient way of developing and delivering goods and services, but that they're actually playing a crucial role in protecting political freedom, protecting political democracy, and they build that story in order to persuade people that government regulation of the marketplace, whether it's to protect workers, consumers, or the environment - even though it might seem attractive superficially - what they're saying is: yeah, but don't be fooled by that because it will actually undermine freedom and democracy. And it's a very clever move because it takes what is initially a self-interested defense of the prerogatives of the privileged, the prerogatives of the captains of industry, and turns it into a seemingly virtuous defense of democracy. And, of course, who wouldn't want to defend democracy?

Author of The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now · Basic Rights
Senior Research Fellow · Centre for International Studies · University of Oxford

We can tell from the science that we have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. And common sense tells you that bringing them down for the second 50% is going to be harder than the first 50%. So we have to take care of the first 50% by about 2030, and it's 2023 already. We literally must - if we're going to keep climate change from becoming even more dangerous than it is - is to do a very great deal in the next seven or eight years. And a huge amount between now and 2050. So it's not that this problem is the most important of all possible problems. There are other problems like preventing nuclear war, but this is a problem that either we get a grip on it now, or there's a real possibility that it will escape from our control. 

Deputy Vice-Chancellor University of Sydney's Indigenous Strategy & Services

We come from the land, and we go back to the land. Aboriginal people have been on this land for at least 60,000 years in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth and survived. And over the last 230 years, the most catastrophic events have occurred to this land because people didn't listen to ancient Aboriginal cultures and knowledge. So my question is, if people were able to look after this place for 60,000 years and thrive, what have we done to ensure that we have a healthy fit world for the next 60,000 years?

Co-founder/CEO of Open Collective - Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation
Alum of YC & Young Global Leaders at World Economic Forum

And so I think many of those challenges have to do with the nature of power and how power is conservative and power will do anything in order to stay in power. And the status quo will do anything and make itself look like anything that you want in order to stay in power. And they might change their spots a little bit here or there, but if you look deep enough, it's the same people. It's the same power.

And so for me, that was the big challenge of realizing that we were facing power and power is conservative, and that's not the way to really achieve the change that we wanted to make. I wasn't patient enough for incremental changes. That's not what I'm interested in. So there's one set of challenges that I think is common to anyone in my position trying to do this. With regards to being a young woman, I mean, sure you face the same kind of sexist comments that you would face anywhere else that I face now as a woman CEO. The best thing I can do for that is just occupying the space and keep occupying the space and refusing to move away or let things like that stop me from engaging.

Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force

There's no such thing as completely clean energy. We use that term a lot, but it's not really true. We have low carbon energy, and lower carbon energy, but any kind of industrial system has requirements for materials and processing, and nothing is completely natural in the industrial world. If we can electrify transportation, I think we can clean up the grid, and then I think we can deal with these life cycle issues in a way that's responsible, but it'll never be zero. That's impossible. The good thing about technology is it can move very fast. And so my advice would be if you're interested in this topic, if you have a mathematical, scientific, or business orientation, or you just like solving problems, get trained to really be part of the technological business revolution that's going on right now.

Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Fmr. Executive Director of Venice Biennale (Dept. of Visual Arts & Architecture)

When I started and I had to decide what to do in life - because I was working with museums, in exhibition design, and on the restoration of buildings - and then at some point, I had the chance to arrive at the Venice Biennale and my whole perspective changed. And it changed because I was working with living artists and architects. Until that moment, I was working around Old Masters, works in museums, and things that were there with the aura of history. And all of a sudden I was dealing with living architects and artists, and this was, for me, the most incredible experience. So I decided to leave all the rest, because I was doing quite a lot at the same time, and to concentrate on the Biennale.

Author of The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion · Foot Work · Stitched Up
Freelance Fashion & Beauty Writer Award Winner

I definitely believe at the moment that fashion brands, big fashion in particular, they just exist to exploit people. It's an excuse to exploit the poor, basically. I see fashion as part of this very extractive global economic society where 100, 150 years ago, that extraction was very obvious. You had the enslavement of people. You had taxation. You had literally armies turning up and occupying the land that they wanted and just taking resources or land. These days it's more subtle, but the brands are still following those colonial pathways.

Tyler Prize Award-winner for Environmental Achievement
Professor of Environmental Change & Public Health
Fmr. Chair of WHO World Health Report · Rockefeller /Lancet Commission on Planetary Health

In terms of the impacts of climate change on health when we started 30 years ago, because there was very little data then, so we made suggestions as to what we thought the health outcomes we thought would be affected like vector-borne diseases, crop failures, water availability, sea level rise, increasing disasters related to climatic extreme events, and obviously the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable populations. In particular, elderly people, but not just elderly people. So we suggested a whole range of different health impacts that could occur. And I think, in general, those ideas have stood the test of time, but of course, as the situation has moved on, we've also become much more preoccupied with what kind of action we need to take.

Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London · Editor-in-Chief of Conservation Biology

Author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts

The idea of expertise and expert judgment has been around and has been something that society depends upon for a long time, but there have been no serious empirical explorations of who's an expert, what a domain of expertise is, and what sort of frailties are experts susceptible to. Those things haven't been addressed in an empirical way until the last 30 years. Some of this work began in the fifties with Kahneman and Tversky. They began to explore the things that make people misjudge risky situations, and that led to a body of research on who makes good judgments and under what circumstances for things that might affect us in various ways.

Lead Author  of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report · Author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope · Sunburnt Country · Contributor to The Climate Book, ed. Greta Thunberg · Not Too Late, eds. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua

We're really starting to witness serious climate extremes that can no longer be ignored. And the IPCC, one of our key conclusions to that report was that effectively the human fingerprint on the climate system is now undeniable. It is now an established fact that we have warmed every single continent, every ocean basin on the planet. And again, that's a pretty serious thing to contemplate that human activity from the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of land has led to this energy imbalance in the earth system, which is leading to a rapidly shifting climate.

Author of Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local
Assistant Professor · International Relations · Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe)

Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States. Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations?

Google’s 1st Engineering Director · Innovation Agitator Emeritus
Author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed

As much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. If you have billion searches per day, you know how many experiments can you run? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that. If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation.

Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Broadcaster and Researcher Working on Climate Change and Mental Health

I think the general waking up that I'm seeing around me in so many different parts of society, people from all walks understanding that this is here, it's not a future threat. It's active now. We need to get smart about addressing it. A lot of people are also asking themselves how can I be of service? What can I do at this time? How am I going to be? And you know, the more climate job boards and networking communities and sites of bringing people together to do that work of figuring out how they're going to go on their climate journey while infusing it with a sense of joy, with a sense of how can we make this fun, right? How can we reshift so this is not just focusing on the negative, but really focusing on what we want to be building and what is abundant and the better life that we're working towards? All of that has been popping up a lot and that gives me an honest sense of hope. So a lot of it is about that relationality, creating conditions of solidarity that bring a sense of stability and security. Even though there's a lot of uncertainty about what the impacts will be and how they're going to affect us, each and every one of us, in the decades ahead. There needs to, amidst all that uncertainty, be other things that can undergird a child and make them feel held, safe, secure, and like they belong to a protective community that's thinking and feeling with them through this.

Author of Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World
The Soil Will Save Us

I think it's this story of cooperation is important in terms of the story that we tell ourselves about nature, and seeing as how we are part of nature, it's important that we see ourselves as possibly a partner instead of a destroyer. I think that we have held onto the perspective that nature is all about competition and conflict. And when we shift that, when we look at nature as this vast web of interconnection and cooperation, and of course competition and conflict in there obviously in some places. But when we look at this vast web of cooperation and collaboration, I think that it changes our view. It changes our view of what's possible.

CEO of Legacy Agripartners · Pushing Farming Forward through Seeds, Regenerative Ag & Rural Communities

It's interesting, as I've gotten older, I've really started to reflect back on that early time growing up on a farm. And I'm fiercely, fiercely proud of where my roots are. And Weldon, Saskatchewan, it's a town of 160 people there today. And just being in a spot where every day you have cattle to feed, you've got a grain crop you're trying to grow, right? The things are subject to weather. The sort of ups and downs of farm life are so dependent on the 6 pm news and the weather forecast each night. It's at times very stressful, but most times incredibly rewarding, right? There's nothing like sitting in a combine at harvest time with all the fruits of your labors all coming in at the same time. It's a great experience. We had cattle, which is just a never-ending thing, right? You know, our vacations were tied around going to cattle shows, cattle sales, bull sales, cow sales, anything that revolved around the farm. And we had a ton of fun on our vacations going to these events and seeing sites in those areas where we went to. But at the end of the day, you know, your life revolves around the cattle on the farm. It revolves around the farm. There's no sort of, we'll take four months off and not worry about it, right? Those cows have to be fed twice a day and looked after. So it's a lot of responsibility, and it's a great way to get yourself ready for life as an adult.

Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations · Leader of Delaware Riverkeeper Network
Author of The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment

What is a Green Amendment? It is language that recognizes the rights of all people to clean water and clean air, a stable climate, and healthy environments, and obligates the government to protect those rights and the natural resources of the state for the benefit of all the people in the state, or if it was a federal green amendment in the United States, and they become obliged to protect those environmental rights and those natural resources for the benefit of both present and future generations, that's functionally what it does. But to help people understand what it accomplishes, a green amendment actually obligates the government to recognize and protect our environmental rights in the same, most powerful way we recognize and protect the other fundamental freedoms we hold dear. Things like the right to free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights, and private property rights. We all know how powerfully they are protected from government overreach and infringement. Well, when we have Green Amendments, now the environment and our environmental rights are added to that list of highest constitutional freedoms and protections.

Hydrologist, Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security, U of Saskatchewan
Host of the Podcast What About Water?

I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes part of the reason why it gets split off because it's thought of as maybe an infrastructure problem, but you know, the changing extremes, the aridification of the West, the increasing frequency, the increasing droughts, these broad global patterns that I've been talking about, that I've been looking at with my research – that's all climate change. Just 100% climate change, a hundred percent human-driven. And so it does need to be elevated in these climate change discussions.

Transnational Indigenous Scholar, Scientist
Author of Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science

I live my life embodying the teaching my grandmother instilled in me – that no matter which lens I walked on, I had to learn how to build relationships with the land and the Indigenous peoples whose land I reside on to become a welcome guest. As a displaced Indigenous woman, my longing to return to my ancestral homelands will always be there, and this is why I continue to support my communities in the diaspora. However, my relationships are not only with my community, but also the Indigenous communities whose land I am displaced on, and this is the foundation of my work while residing in the Pacific Northwest. I strongly believe that in order to start healing Indigenous landscapes, everyone must understand their positionality as either settlers, unwanted guests, or welcomed guests, and that is ultimately determined by the Indigenous communities whose land you currently reside on or occupy. This teaching has also helped me envision my goals in life. Every day I get closer to becoming an ancestor because life is not guaranteed but rather a gift we are granted from our ancestors who are now in the spiritual world.

Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Becoming Wild · Song for the Blue Ocean · Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being.

Co-author of Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology
Principal at Archipelago Consulting · Former VP for Conservation Science & Strategy, Wildlife Conservation Society

The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it. It amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.

Author of The Mind of a Bee
Founder of the Research Centre for Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

The world of bees is under threat, and that is not because bees are singled out, but because bees live in the environment that we all share and they are a kind of a canary in the coal mine for what's going on more largely in destroying our environment. And in a sense they are, I think, a useful sort of mascot and icon to highlight these troubles, but they are only a signpost of other things that are also under threat. We need the bee for our own food because they pollinate our crops, and they pollinate the flowers that we enjoy, but I think their utility for us is not the only reason to support them and their environment. I think the growing appreciation that the world that surrounds us is full of sophisticated and unique minds places on us a kind of onus and obligation to preserve the diversity of these minds that are out there and make sure that they continue to thrive.

Founding Director of Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Philosopher, Author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

I do think though that there is a real possibility that within the lifetime of many people who are here today, we will see the arrival of transformative AI, machine intelligence systems that not only can automate specific tasks but can replicate the full generality of human thinking. So that everything that we humans can do with our brains, machines will be able to do, and in fact do faster and more efficiently. What the consequences of that are, is very much an open question and, I think, depends in part on the extent to which we manage to get our act together before these developments. In terms of, on the one hand, working out our technical issues in AI alignment, figuring out exactly the methods by which you could ensure that such very powerful cognitive engines will be aligned to our values, will actually do what we intend for them to do, as opposed to something else. And then, of course, also the political challenges of ensuring that such a powerful technology will be used for positive ends. So depending on how well we perform among those two challenges, the outcome, I think, could be extremely good or extremely bad. And I think all of those possibilities are still in the cards.

Executive Director & Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health
Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication

Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.

So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.

Renowned Arsenic and Lead Specialist
Research Professor · Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory · Columbia University

So this was maybe nine months after the fire in Notre Dame, and I had been struck visually by the fire, the yellow smoke, which is a telltale indicator of lead. The fact that 400 tons of lead constituted the covering of the roof of the cathedral. And a lot of that had volatilized, presumably, but no one really knew how much. So that got me thinking, and I happened to be in Paris at the time, so I thought if it's so much lead, could it be that it affected the population living within say a kilometer of the cathedral? I thought there wasn't really a lot of clear information about what had happened, and what had been measured. I thought some more openness and transparency was needed.

Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist
Technical Advisor on all Jurassic Park / Jurassic World Films

I found my first fossil when I was six years old. And I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I didn't think there was much hope for it, though. I was doing very poorly in school. I think I was always a pretty positive kid. And so even though I wasn't doing well in school, I was really happy about the fact that I was finding all these cool fossils, and I was making collections. I don't know when it came to me that I would do this, but I think I just was born this way.

CEO of GlobeScan - Co-author of All In: The Future of Business Leadership

While we need action, I think at the same time, the world and the agenda are moving so quickly. We're learning more all the time. We really can't skip the dialogue part, and we need to create more space and more opportunity to think through - What are we trying to do? What have we learned? How do we move smarter and more quickly? So it's not just about doing more action constantly. It's taking stock consistently because the agenda keeps evolving at a more rapid pace than it has historically, which means we need to find more places for proper dialogue that are springboards for this action, but we shouldn't discount the fact that we've got to sometimes just stop and chat and listen and learn and that makes us better and stronger.

Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

Founder, Director & Co-Visionary of Fairhaven Farm

What's trending now with beginning farmers is that it is creating this kind of community connection. It's bringing people to the farm. It's connecting them to their food source. That creates community. It helps cultivate culture and connectivity, and so I think overall, it's like the landscape and agriculture as a whole is shifting towards a different direction.

Professor of Ecology at UC Irvine
Director of Newkirk Center for Science & Society at UC Irvine

It’s basically a seed bank of genetic and metabolic diversity. The Earth’s entire microbiome is just a tremendous treasure trove of history, evolution, and diversity. So I would say we have no idea what’s in a lot of that diversity. It's like the dark matter of the universe. People call it the dark matter of the microbiome, and we're still figuring out what that matter does. We know that they're tremendously diverse. The sequencing revolution that happened over the last 20 or 30 years has made it possible to measure the diversity, but we don't know what that diversity is really doing or how to harness it if we need it. So would be wise not to disrespect it.

Editor of Rethinking Sustainable Cities · Professor of Development Geography & Director for External Engagement, School of Life Sciences & Environment, Royal Holloway, University of London

That principle, what is now called by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and being popularized more widely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Network and others as the 15 or 20 Minute City. The idea underpinning it is that a higher proportion of the goods and services, the activities, the social interactions that we need are obtainable within a 1 1/2 to 2 km radius of one's home, which means a far higher proportion of one's individual trips or multiple purpose journeys can be done on foot and by bicycle, therefore, you use your vehicle if you have one more sparingly. You use the bus or minibusses to reach slightly more distant places, and then you have transport interchanges is where you connect with the metro system or the best rapid transit or the railway to reach other parts of large cities or indeed for inner-city journeys. And that is what is now becoming the new best practice in terms of urban planning redesign.

Global Sustainability Advisor · Co-Author of The Sustainability Puzzle: How Systems Thinking, Climate Action, Circularity and Social Transformation Can Improve Health, Wealth and Wellbeing for All

What is societal progress? I think the last 70 years, clearly, in the post World War II period, we have been thinking of economic growth and have been equating that with societal progress. To an extent of course that's right. To an extent, we need this economic growth to lift people out of poverty. We’ve kind of lost the reasoning. We have been following only this economic growth paradigm measured by the GDP, the Gross domestic product and we have forgotten that it measures many things, but it doesn't actually measure progress. It doesn't measure how healthy people are, how educated they are, how clean the environment is, how safe it is, how secure it is. It’s something where we really need to do a lot to transform those mindsets and in the end to understand that sustainability is about making their lives better and not worse.

Environmental Lawyer · Partner Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP
Author of Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont

It's kind of a scary thought. We've got these PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), you hear them now referred to as forever chemicals because these chemicals–none of these existed on the planet prior to World War II–they're fairly recent invention and they have this unique chemical structure that makes them incredibly useful in a lot of different products, manufacturing operations, but also that same chemical structure makes them incredibly persistent and incredibly difficult to break down once they get out into the environment, into the natural world, into our soil, into our water. They simply, many of them, particularly the ones with eight or more carbons in their structure, don't break down under natural conditions. Or it may take thousands or millions of years for those chemicals to start breaking down. But not only that. Once they get into us, they get into people, they tend to accumulate in our blood and build up over time. They not only persist, they bioaccumulate. Unfortunately, as the science has slowly been revealed to the world about what these chemicals can do, we are seeing that they can have all kinds of toxic effects And unfortunately, we’re finding that those things can happen at lower and lower dose levels.

Author of Just Enough · Small Spaces · Lead Researcher for Safecast
Authority on Japanese Architecture, Design & Environmentalism

In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there’s a lot that we could talk about design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two storeys. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive solar heating. Good use of planting, gardens, etc. But regarding cities of the future, I think the main thing is it needs to be a place where people feel like they belong and want to take responsibility.

Author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History
G.T. & Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma

Human well-being is both a question of social development in a very holistic sense that people have jobs that provide adequate food and clean water as well as the elimination of dangerous microbes, and so the question is how do societies continue to develop in a way that's globally equitable and sustainable and that's really one of wicked hardest problems on the planet is how do we continue to experience growth without having carbon emissions that make growth and impossible, that continue to hold societies in poverty, and that continue to imperil human health.

Founding Director of Planetary Health Alliance
Principal Research Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

I think the environmental community has been guilty of a lot of catastrophism, a lot of statements like ‘Game Over for the Planet’, and we’ve painted a lot of very dark pictures about where we’re going, but when you look across these different sectors and all the solutions that are out there, there’s no reason to believe that our grandchildren couldn’t live in an incredibly exciting world.

Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
Founder of Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine in Haiti

We’re coming out of one of the worst times for resource exploitation, waste and everything related to that waste of resources, so trying to set the example, especially for my kids, recycling, trying to be reasonable about purchasing things, about where things end up after you’re done using them, just in general being careful about what you do, what impacts there are down the line. Even for them already, they’re 18 and 20 now–What are you going to do to try to protect the planet for your kids? Already trying to put that mindset for them because it’s very difficult for our generation to change the way it has done things for so long, but trying to at least bring that change. Be responsible, be reasonable, think about the impacts.

Canopy Director of One Tree Planted

We planted over 10 million trees in 2020 alone. And it’s one tree planted for every dollar donated, so we make it as simple as possible, but when you add it all up together the impact is just tremendous and growing every day.”

Carbon Ruins · Climate Futures · Climaginaries · Earth Systems Governance Project

Our starting point was that a lot of the stories we tell about future worlds are quite poor. It’s not stories that are meeting the world as it is now. It’s difficult for people to inhabit the kinds of worlds that we imagine through scenarios or modelling, so there is a kind of distance between where we are now and the life worlds of a decarbonized or a post-fossil world.

Artist, Documentary Filmmaker & Multimedia Installation Creator

Art can be part healing process. There's a lot of research being done. People heal faster a garden rather than a parking lot, for example. The theory is that an opening in the woods with a little bit of water is probably the most healing place. That's the safest because that's what we have built-in as humans as the safe spot. The ocean is not safe, but the little pond. So, what I've done in this particular project with the radiotherapy rooms is that I've taken images from healing wells, partly from Stellenbosch National Park in Capetown, in Rio. I've been filming these water surfaces. I’ve been filming the trees through the water surface basically to create that water pond and the trees around, but from these places that have kind of a healing history.

Artist & World Traveler inspired by Nature & Indigenous Cultures

When we moved back to Hawaii and lived on Molokai. I was teaching at the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony, we had no money. And I was spearfishing, not for sport, but to get food for my family. And it was a beautiful time of our lives. We were so poor, but we were not poor. Poor is a state of mind. We were without money, but we were having so much fun.

Shark Scientist, Science Communicator, TV Presenter & Author

A lot of people when you think of sharks, you think of hammerheads, great white sharks, tiger sharks, but there’s so much more diversity than just that. There’s over 500 different species and on average we’re discovering new species every two weeks, not just of sharks, but also their cousins, the stingrays, skates and sometimes the chimeras as well. And so knowing that diversity exists, for me it’s really important to get that message out there.

Pina Gervassi is the Climate Director of the Forest Stewardship Council

Since I was a child, most of my family were dedicated to nature, fishing and agricultural engineers, so I started to love nature since I was very little, and then when I realised how important the Amazon is for the world and that I was living in a country [Peru] that’s really important, not only because of forests but also for biodiversity, indigenous people…I decided that I wanted to do that and I knew that was the place I wanted to be.

Environmental Activist
Founder Assisi Bird Campaign & Action for Nature

I witnessed being totally rejected and not only witnessed, I remembered as a ten-year old all the children would go to a class in eugenics that I was not allowed to go to. I remember the insults that children learned against Jews while I was still in Germany. And I’m one of the lucky Jews who managed to leave.”