Edward Burtynsky on manufactured landscapes

Walk around for four months with three wishes, and all the ideas will start to percolate up. I think everybody should do it -- think that you've got three wishes. And what would you do? It's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important, and really reflect on the world around us. And thinking that, can an individual actually do something, or come up with something, that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference? Inspired by nature -- that's the theme here. And I think, quite frankly, that's where I started.

I became very interested in the landscape as a Canadian. We have this Great North. And there was a pretty small population, and my father was an avid outdoorsman. So I really had a chance to experience that. And I could never really understand exactly what it was, or how it was informing me. But what I think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that's happening. And that the nature that you see out there -- the untouched shorelines, the untouched forest that I was able to see -- really bring in a sense of that geological time, that this has gone on for a long time, and we're experiencing it in a different way.

And that, to me, was a reference point that I think I needed to have to be able to make the work that I did. And I did go out, and I did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring, along a roadside. This rebirth of grass. And then I went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape. But as a fine-art photographer I somehow felt that it wouldn't catch on out there -- that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career. And I kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture, or something of that nature, and I couldn't get away from it. So I started to think of, how can I rethink the landscape? I decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we've transformed.

I had a bit of an epiphany being lost in Pennsylvania, and I took a left turn trying to get back to the highway. And I ended up in a town called Frackville. I got out of the car, and I stood up, and it was a coal-mining town. I did a 360 turnaround, and that became one of the most surreal landscapes I've ever seen. Totally transformed by man. And that got me to go out and look at mines like this, and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that I could find. And that became the baseline of what I was doing. And it also became the theme that I felt that I could hold on to, and not have to re-invent myself. That this theme was large enough to become a life's work -- to become something that I could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are.

And I think one of the things I also wanted to say in my thanks, which I kind of missed, was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in. Because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs -- to get into that place to make those photographs. And if it wasn't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations, I would have never made this body of work. So in that respect, to me, I'm not against the corporation. I own a corporation. I work with them, and I feel that we all need them and they're important. But I am also for sustainability.

So there's this thing that is pulling me in both directions. And I'm not making an indictment towards what's happening here, but it is a slow progression. So I starting thinking, well, we live in all these ages of man: the Stone Age, and the Iron Age, and the Copper Age. And these ages of man are still at work today. But we've become totally disconnected from them. There's something that we're not seeing there. And it's a scary thing as well. Because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles, and what we're doing to that landscape -- that, to me, is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate.

And through my photographs, I'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work, and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image. Not to say, "Oh my God, what is it?" But to be challenged by it. To say, "Wow, this is beautiful on one level. But on the other level, this is scary. I shouldn't be enjoying it." Like a forbidden pleasure. And it's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it. And it also, in a way, defines kind of what I feel, too. Is that I'm drawn to have a good life. I want a house, and I want a car. But there's this consequence out there. And how do I begin to have that attraction, repulsion? It's even in my own conscience I'm having it, and here in my work, I'm trying to build that same toggle.

These things that I photographed -- this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it. It was the largest one. It was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me, and it caught fire about four years ago. It's around Westley, California, around Modesto. And I decided to start looking at something that, to me, had -- if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature, in the recycling work that you're seeing here was starting to point to a direction. To me, it was our redemption. That in the recycling work that I was doing, I'm looking for a practice -- a human activity that is sustainable. That if we keep putting things, through industrial and urban existence, back into the system -- if we keep doing that -- we can continue on. Of course, listening at the conference, there's many, many things that are coming. Bio-mimicry, and there's many other things that are coming onstream -- nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart. And we all look forward to those things.

But in the meantime, these things are scaling up. These things are continuing to happen. What you're looking at here -- I went to Bangladesh, so I started to move away from North America. I started to look at our world globally. And this came about -- these images of Bangladesh -- came out of a radio program I was listening to. They were talking about Exxon Valdez, and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries. And that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned, and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle. And I thought, "My God, wouldn't that be something?" To see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand, literally, in third-world countries. So originally I was going to go to India. And I was shut out of India because of a Greenpeace situation there, and then I was able to get into Bangladesh. And saw for the first time a third world, a view of it that I had never actually thought was possible. 130 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin, people everywhere, the pollution was intense, and the working conditions were horrible.

Here you're looking at some oil fields in California, some of the biggest oil fields. And again, I started to think that -- there was another epiphany -- that the whole world I was living in was being created as a result of having plentiful oil. And that, to me, was again something that I started building on, and I continued to build on. So this is a series I'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years, kind of, under the heading of The Oil Party. Because I think everything that we're involved in -- our clothing, our cars, our roads, and everything -- are directly a result. I'm going to move to some pictures of China. And through China -- I started photographing it four years ago, and China truly is a question of sustainability in my mind.

Not to mention that China, as well, has a great effect on the industries that I grew up around. Because I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM. So I was very familiar with that kind of industry. And that also informed my work. But you know, to see China and the scale at which it's evolving, is quite something. So what you see here is the Three Gorges Dam, and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man. And most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said, "It's just too big." In fact, when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago, they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning. It took fifteen days to fill it. So this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long, one of the largest reservoirs ever created. And what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir, and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships.

This is a before and after. So that was before. And this is like 10 weeks later, demolished by hand. I think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite, everything else was by hand. That was 10 weeks later. And this gives you an idea. Again with -- and it was all the people who lived in those homes, were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working, and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart. And these are some of the images from that. So I spent about three trips to the Three Gorges Dam, looking at that massive transformation of a landscape. And it looks like a bombed-out landscape, but it isn't. What it is, it's a landscape that is an intentional one. This is a need for power, and they're willing to go through this massive transformation, on this scale, to get that power.

And again, it's actually a relief for what's going on in China because I think on the table right now, there's 27 nuclear power stations to be built. There hasn't been one built in North America for 20 years because of the NIMBY problem -- not in my backyard. But in China they're saying, "No, we're putting in 27 in the next 10 years." And coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power, literally weekly. So coal itself is probably one of the largest problems. And one of the other things that happened in the Three Gorges -- a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost. Some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that. And at one point, two million people were relocated, depending on whose statistics you're looking at. And this is what they were building.

This is Wushan, one of the largest cities that was relocated. This is the central headquarters, or the town hall, for the city. And again, the rebuilding of the city. To me it was sad to see that they didn't really grab a lot of, I guess, what we know here, in terms of urban planning. There were no parks, there were no green spaces. Very high-density living on the side of a hill. And here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up, but somehow we're not connecting with them.

Here is a sign that, translated, says, "Obey the birth control law. Build our science. Civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth." So here, if you look at this poster, it has all the trappings of Western culture. You're seeing the tuxedos, the bouquets. But what's really, to me, frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background. So it's like marrying up all the things that we have and it's an adaptation of our way of life, full stop. And again, when you start seeing that kind of embrace, and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very, very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint, it starts to become very sobering.

This is a shot in one of the biggest squares in Guangdong -- and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country. And there's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times. And in the next 10 to 15 years, are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like Shanghai and the manufacturing centers. The manufacturers are -- the domestics are usually -- you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms. So this is a pink uniform at this factory. It's a shoe factory. And they have dorms for the workers. So they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms.

This is one of the biggest shoe factories, the Yuyuan shoe factory near Shenzhen. It has 90,000 employees making shoes. This is a shift change, one of three. At every change -- there's two factories of this scale in the same town. This is one with 45,000. So every lunch, there's about 12,000 coming through for lunch. They sit down, they have about 20 minutes. The next round comes in. It's an incredible workforce that's building there. Shanghai -- I'm looking at the urban renewal in Shanghai, and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years.

What's also happening in Shanghai is -- China is changing because this wouldn't have happened five years ago, for instance. This is a holdout. They're called dengzahoos* -- they're like pin tacks to the ground. They won't move. They're not negotiating. They're not getting enough, so they're not going to move. And so they're holding off until they get a deal with them. And they've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal. They're being put out about two hours -- the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years, or maybe even thousands of years, are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of Shanghai. But these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of Shanghai. Probably the largest urban-renewal project, I think, ever attempted on the planet.

And then the embrace of the things that they're replacing it with -- again, one of my wishes, and I never ended up going there, was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house. The kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something, and these are called the villas. And also, like right now, they're just moving. The scaffolding is still on, and this is an e-waste area, and if you looked in the foreground on the big print, you'd see that the industry -- their industry -- they're all recycling. So the industry's already growing around these new developments.

This is a five-level bridge in Shanghai. Shanghai was a very intriguing city -- it's exploding on a level that I don't think any city has experienced. In fact, even Shenzhen, the industrial, or the economic zone -- one of the first ones -- 15 years ago was about 100,000 people, and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million. So that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which -- this is just the taxis being built by Volkswagen. There's 9,000 of them here, and they're being built for most of the big cities, Beijing and Shanghai, Shenzhen. And this isn't even the domestic car market, this is the taxi market. And what we would see here as kind of a suburban kind of development -- a similar thing, but they're all high-rises. So they'll put 20 or 40 up at a time, and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area.

And the density is quite incredible. And one of the things in this picture that I wanted to point out is that when I saw these kinds of buildings, I was shocked to see that they're not using a central air-conditioning system. Every window has an air conditioner in it. And I'm sure there are people here who probably know better than I do about efficiencies, but I can't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale. And when you start looking at that, and then you start factoring up into a city the size of Shanghai, it's literally a forest of skyscrapers. It's breathtaking, in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming. And you can see in the foreground of this picture, it's still one of the last areas that was being held up. Right now that's all cleared out -- this was done about eight months ago, and high-rises are now going up into that central spot. So a skyscraper is built, literally, overnight in Shanghai.

Most recently I went in, and I started looking at some of the biggest industries in China. And this is Baosteel, right outside of Shanghai. This is the coal supply for the steel factory -- 18 square kilometers. It's an incredibly massive operation, I think 15,000 workers, five cupolas, and the sixth one's coming in here. So they're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in China. So this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot. And again, looking at these images, there's this constant, like, haze that you're seeing. This is going to show you, real time, an assembler. It's a circuit breaker. 10 hours a day at this speed. I think one of the issues that we here are facing with China, is that they're using a lot of the latest production technology.

In that one, there were 400 people that worked on the floor. And I asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers, and then I went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes, and picked this one woman. And it was just lightning fast, the way she was working was almost unbelievable. But that is the trick that they've got right now, that they're winning with, is that they're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines, and bringing all the components into play, but the assembly is where they're actually bringing in -- the country workers are very willing to work. They want to work. There's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs. That condition's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want, which is, you know, 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities.

In this particular case -- this is the assembly line that you saw, and this is a shot of it. I had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field. I had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot. It took me five fake tries because they were just going. To slow them down was literally impossible. They were just wound up doing these things all day long, until the manager had to, with a stern voice, say, "Okay, everybody freeze." It wasn't too bad, but they're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate.

This a textile mill doing synthetic silk, an oil byproduct. And what you're seeing here is, again, one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills. There's 500 of these machines, they're worth about 200,000 dollars each. So you have about 12 people running this, and they're just inspecting it -- and they're just walking the lines. The machines are all running, absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are. And I started getting in further and further into the factories. And that's a diptych, so I do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places. This is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together, pre-going into the textile mills.

Here's something that's far more labor intensive, which is the making of shoes. This floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor. The company itself had about 10,000 employees, and they're doing domestic shoes. It was very hard to get into the international companies because I had to get permission from companies like Nike and Adidas, and that's very hard to get. And they don't want to let me in. But the domestic was much easier to do. It just gives you a sense of, again -- and that's where, really, the whole migration of jobs started going over to China and making the shoes. Nike was one of the early ones. And it was really -- it was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market.

This is a high-tech mobile phone. Bird mobile phone, one of the largest mobile makers in China. I think mobile phone companies are popping up, literally, on a weekly basis, and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones. This is a textile where they're doing shirts. Youngor, the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in China. And this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms. Everything is very efficient. While setting up this shot, people on average would spend 8 to 10 minutes having a lunch. This was one of the biggest factories I've ever seen. They make coffeemakers here, the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers. They make 20 million of them in the world. There's 21,000 employees. This one factory -- and they had several of them -- is half a kilometer long. These are just recently shot -- I just came back about a month ago, so you're the first ones to be seeing these, these new factory pictures I've taken.

So it's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places. The other aspect of what's happening in China is that there's a real need for materials there. So a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to China by ships. That's cubed metal. This is armatures, electrical armatures, where they're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out, and recycling them. This is certainly connected to California and Silicon Valley. But this is what happens to most of the computers. 50 percent of the world's computers end up in China to be recycled.

It's referred to as e-waste there. And it is a bit of a problem. The way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes, which are used all through China, but they heat up the boards, and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components. They're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components. But the toxic smells -- when you come into a town that's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards, you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there. Here's another operation. It's all cottage industries, so it's not big places -- it's all in people's front porches, in their backyards, even in their homes they're burning boards.

If there's a concern for somebody coming by -- because it is considered in China to be illegal, doing it, but they can't stop the product from coming in. This portrait -- I'm not usually known for portraits, but I couldn't resist this one, where she's been through Mao, and she's been through the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and now she's sitting on a porch with this e-waste beside her. It's quite something. This is a road where it's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they're recycling. So that's the photographs that I wanted to show you.

(Applause)

I want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls. They've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while I've been thinking. One's Megan, the one of the right, and Katja there. And to me the whole notion -- the things I'm photographing are of great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress. And as much as there are great things around the corner -- and it's palpable in this room -- of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems, I'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world. And will start to have a positive effect. And it isn't something that isn't just affecting our world, but it starts to go up -- because I think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down -- but there's a growing footprint that's happening in Asia, and is growing at a rapid, rapid rate, and so I don't think we can equalize it. So ultimately the strategy, I think, here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution. Because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well.

So part of my thinking, and part of my wishes, is sitting with these thoughts in mind, and thinking about, "How is their life going to be when they want to have children, or when they're ready to get married 20 years from now -- or whatever, 15 years from now?" And to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking. In my work, and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes. Wish one: world-changing. I want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability. And it is through communications today that I believe that that is not an unreal idea. Oh, and I went in search -- I wanted to put what I had in mind, hitch it onto something. I didn't want a wish just to start from nowhere.

One of them I'm starting from almost nothing, but the other one, I wanted to find out what's going on that's working right now. And Worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog, and that blog is now being visited by close to half a million people a month. And it just started about 14 months ago. And the beauty of what's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that I like. What they're doing there is that they're not -- I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much. It's used the apocalyptic tone too much. It hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally-concerned and trying to pull us out, whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements. About how to change our world in a better way, quickly. And it's looking at technology, and it's looking at new energy-saving devices, and it's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability.

And so for me, one of the things that I thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the Worldchanging.com website. Some of you might know, he's a TEDster -- Stephen Sagmeister and I are working on some layouts. And this is still in preliminary stages. These aren't the finals. But these images, with Worldchanging.com, can be placed into any kind of media. They could be posted through the Web, they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter, or anything of that nature. So we're looking at this as trying to build out. And what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text, and the text is blasted all over.

What was unusual, according to Stephen, is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image. And so in this case, because it's about a lot of these images and what they represent, and the kinds of questions they bring up, that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say, "Well, what's Worldchanging.com, with these images, have to do?" And hopefully inspire people to go to that website. So Worldchanging.com, and building that blog, and it is a blog, and I'm hoping that it isn't -- I don't see it as the kind of blog where we're all going to follow each other to death. This one is one that will spoke out, and will go out, and to start reaching. Because right now there's conversations in India, in China, in South America -- there's entries coming from all around the world. I think there's a chance to have a dialogue, a conversation about sustainability at Worldchanging.com. And anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic.

Wish two is more of the bottom-up, ground-up one that I'm trying to work with. And this one is: I wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on, and invent ideas on, sustainability. And one of the things that came out -- Allison, who actually nominated me, said something earlier on in a brainstorming. She said that recycling in Canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six. And you think about it, you know, grade four -- my wife and I, we say age seven is the age of reason, so they're into the age of reason. And they're pre-puberty. So it's this great window where they actually are -- you can influence them. You know what happens at puberty? You know, we know that from earlier presentations.

So my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas. Let them understand what sustainability is, and that they have a vested interest in it to happen. And one of the ways I thought of doing it is to use my prize, so I would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings, and the rest is going to be to manage this project. But to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands. But the other thing that I thought would be fantastic was to create these -- call them prize targets. And so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project. The best one for a household project. Or it could be the best community project for sustainability.

And I also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for "In My World." And what would happen -- it's a scalable thing. And if we can get people to put in things -- whether it's equipment, like a media lab, or money to make the prize significant enough -- and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools, or schools that are with kids that age, and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them. And the prize has to be a verifiable thing, so it's not about just ideas. The art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them, but the actual things have to be verifiable. In that way, what's happening is that we're motivating a certain age group to start thinking. And they're going to push that up, from the bottom -- up into, I believe, into the households. And parents will be reacting to it, and trying to help them with the projects.

And I think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way, and starts to teach them. They know about recycling now, but they don't really, I think, get sustainability in all the things, and the energy footprint, and how that matters. And to teach them, to me, would be a fantastic wish, and it would be something that I would certainly put my shoulder into. And again, in "My World," the competition -- we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it. And I like the words, "In My World," because it gives possession of the world to the person who's doing it. It is my world, it's not someone else's, I want to help it. I want to do something with it. So I think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations -- and great ideas, I think, come from kids -- and engage their imagination into a project, and do something for schools. I think all schools could use extra equipment, extra cash -- it's going to be an incentive for them to do that. And these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for "In My World."

And wish three is Imax film. So I was told I should do one for myself, and I've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something. And the scale of my work, and the kinds of ideas I'm playing with -- when I first saw an Imax film, I almost immediately thought, "There's a real resonance between what I'm trying to do, and the scale of what I try to do as a photographer." And I think there's a real possibility to make a powerful -- to reach new audiences if I had a chance. So I'm looking, really, for a mentor, because I just had my birthday. I'm 50, and I don't have time to go back to school right now -- I'm too busy. So I need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that, and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this. That would be fantastic. So those are my three wishes.

(Applause)

6 ways mushrooms can save the world: Paul Stamets on TED.com

6 ways mushrooms can save the world: Paul Stamets on TED.com
Mycologist Paul Stamets studies mycelium and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world. Cleaning polluted soil, creating new insecticides, treating smallpox and maybe even the flu ... in 18 minutes, he doesn't get all the way through his list, but he has plenty of time to blow your mind. An audience favorite at TED2008. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 17:44.)

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I love a challenge, and saving the earth is probably a good one. We all know the earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X -- The sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered if there was a United Organization of Organisms -- otherwise known as U-O (pronounces it "uh-oh"), (laughter) -- and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now.

I want to present to you a suite of 6 mycological solutions using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium.

(graphic of Earth from space, growing a halo of mycelium; then photo of someone holding up a strand of mycelium pulled from the soil; then photo of mycelium growing on wood)

The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious -- this holds up to 30 thousand times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature, the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the land masses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mycelium --

(drawing of trees with soil cross section, showing mycelium connections)

so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees, to hemlocks, cedars, and Douglas firs.

(photo of Dusty Yao walking through northwestern rainforest)

Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those.

(photo of giant mushroom silhouetted against the sky)

Most of you are familiar with portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle when I mention mushrooms to somebody. They immediately think portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown when it comes to fungi.

(series of shots of mushrooms growing on a hunk of organic medium)

Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. (series of cuts illustrating speed of growth, ending with shot of mature mushrooms) Day 21, day 23, day 25.

Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics.

(shot of big mushrooms rotting in the wild)

In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting Opisthokonta -- a super-kingdom that joins Animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here (refers back to photo) is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that fuel the mycelium.

(photo of yellow mushroom on the floor of the forest, exuding spores)

And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating,

(photo of a patch of mycelium on the forest floor, dissolving into the undergrowth, with Stamets' foot in photo to show scale)

-and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be 8 miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.

(microscopic movie of mycelium growing, branching out and thickening)

This is photo-micrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory, and then it begins the net.

(final microscopic shot of fully netted mass of mycelia)

I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I've thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept, that these are extended neurological membranes.

(close up of one of the mycelium nets)

And in these cavities, these microcavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbal communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe --

(shot of starscape with mycelium superimposed on it -- "The Opte Project")

-that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing -- internet engineers maybe call them "hot points" -- There's alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris.

So, I believe, the invention of the computer internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven biologically successful model. The earth invented the computer internet for its own benefit, and we, now, being the top organism on this planet, is trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.

(article on dark matter with rendering of "Cobweb of dark matter")

Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life, life becomes single cells, single cells become strings, strings become chains, chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.

(photo of Earth from space)

Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible?

(electron micrograph of mycelium holding mineral crystals)

It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals, and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil.

(slide of chemical models of oxalic acid (C2H2O4; HOOCCOOH) and calcium oxalate (CaC2O4))

Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.

(photo of geologist in the field, examining a large fossil of Prototaxites)

This was first discovered in 1859, this is the photograph by Franz Hueber, this photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about 3 feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth, at that time, were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus. A giant mushroom.

(Artist's rendering of Devonian landscape with towering Prototaxites)

Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.

Now we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward, 65 million years ago -- most of you know about it -- we had an asteroid impact. The earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the earth.

Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, 'cause fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a foregone conclusion. At least in my own mind.

(satellite photo of the Pacific Northwest)

The largest organism in the world is in eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it, it was 22 hundred acres in size. 22 hundred acres in size, 2,000 years old.

(overhead shot of forest landscape in eastern Oregon)

The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have 5 or 6 skin layers that protect us?

(electron micrograph of mycelium mass)

The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom,

(photo of mushroom poking through a parking lot)

-- it bursts through with such ferocity it can break asphalt.

We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you 6, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world.

(photo of scientists working on experiment described below)

Battelle Laboratories and I joined up, in Bellingham, Washington, there were 4 piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste. One was a control pile, one pile was treated with enzymes, one pile was treated with a bacteria, and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium.

(photo of oil getting captured by mycelium ring)

The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes -- peroxydases -- that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These're the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So the mycelium become saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned 6 weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms --

(photo of their pile, covered in mushrooms)

-- and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates -- fungal sugars.

(photo of giant & healthy mushroom on the pile)

Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained.

But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life.

(shot of their pile with grass growing on it)

Whereas the other 3 piles were dead, dark, and stinky, and the PAH's -- the aromatic hydrocarbons -- went from 10 thousand parts per million to less than 200 in 8 weeks. The last image we don't have -- the entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species. Vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.

(photo of man holding burlap sack full of mycelium)

So I invented burlap sacks -- "bunker spawn" -- and putting the mycelium, using storm blown debris,

(diagram of how to bury sacks for waste cleanup)

-- you can take these burlap sacks and put 'em downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration.

(photo of woman and other workers laying down burlap sacks in a field)

So we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms, and I'll show you a graph here-

(somewhat illegible graph showing results described below)

-this is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the 8th power, there's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to 3rd power is about a thousand. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these 3 mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space conservative method that uses storm debris -- and we can be guaranteed that we will have storms every year.

(Dusty Yao, posing with mushroom)

So this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis -- Agaricon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old growth forest, that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington state, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large -- let's get closer.

(Stamets holding Agaricon, it's as large as his torso)

This is extremely rare fungus. Our team, and we have a team of experts that go out -- We went out 20 times in the old growth forest last year, we found one sample to be able to get into culture.

Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old growth forest, I think, is absolutely critical for human health.

(series of micrographs of mushroom spores)

I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting is (sic) extracellular metabolites -- And a few years ago, we received these results.

(table showing activity of mushroom strains against pox virus)

We have three different strains of Agaricon mushrooms that were highly active against pox viruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a Selectivity Index of 2 or more are active, 10 or greater is considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read -- it's vetted by DOD, if you Google "Stamets" and "smallpox" -- or you can go to npr.org and listen to a live interview.

So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses.

(table of "Highly Active Mushroom Strains Against Flu Viruses" showing reactivity of various species)

And so, for the first time I am showing this. We have 3 different strains of Agaricon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the Selectivity Index numbers -- against pox, you saw 10s and 20s -- now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses -- H1N1, H3N2 -- as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than a thousand Selectivity Index. (applause) I then -- I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old growth forest as a matter of national defense. (applause)

(photo of array of Petri dishes containing spores)

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi -- Fungi that kill insects. Our house is being destroyed by carpenter ants. I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chase the mycelium when it stopped producing spores. These are spores -- this is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form.

(two Petri dishes with new cultures)

And so the industry has spent over a 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form --

(photo of dish sitting beside a wall, holding new mushroom culture)

-- and I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house,

(photo of ants devouring mycelium)

-- and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.

And then, a delicate dance between dinner and death --

(dead ant covered in mycelium)

-- the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and boing --

(ant with a mushroom growing out of it)

-- a mushroom pops out of their head. (laughter and moans of disgust) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So you have a near-permanent solution for re-invasion of termites.

(shot of exterior of house w/ construction equipment, followed by shot of patent form)

And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites, and fire ants,

(photo of more Petri dishes and spore prints, followed by another patent form)

-then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent -- and this is a big one. It's been called an "Alexander Graham Bell" patent -- It covers over 200 thousand species.

This is the most disruptive technology, I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry, that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly a hundred PhD students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.

(photo of "Life Box," "The Way to Re-Green the Planet", then photo of someone opening one)

And so I came up with a Life Box. 'Cause I needed a delivery system. The Life Box -- you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference,

(photo of empty cardboard box in a dish being sprinkled with soil, then being watered, finally shot of spores growing on cardboard)

-- you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agaricon mushroom. The seeds, then, are mothered by this mycelium.

(photo of mycelium rich soil in box with trees sprouting in it)

And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing -- potentially -- an old growth forest from a cardboard box.

(photo of path in a forest)

I want to re-invent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make an interactive Zip Code specific -- where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.

(shot of UPS guy handing a box of shoes to girl)

You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water -- I developed this for the refugee community --

(shot of someone watering soil filled box, which then fills with plants)

corns beans and squash and onions -- I took several containers, my wife said if I could do this, anybody could.

(shot of back porch garden, before and after planting)

And I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds -- and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this --

(graphic -- "Harvesting the seed garden" -- photo of two girls harvesting garden -- "Time from germination to seed harvest: approximately 4-5 months", then photo of Dusty Yao harvesting the corn)

And then you're harvesting the seed garden,

(photo of kernels encased in mycelium, about to be wrapped around cobs)

Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels, I add mycelium to it,

(photo of wrapped/inoculated cobs, one side beginning to grow mushrooms, the other side starting off empty)

and then I inoculate the corn cobs. Now, three corn cobs, no other grain -- lots of mushrooms begin to form -- too many withdrawals from the carbon bank. And so, this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here.

(points to formerly empty side -- series of shots showing the mushrooms growing on the cobs)

The mushrooms then are harvested -- but, very importantly -- the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.

(photo of vial of "Econol" with burning wick)

Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary -- and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels so we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils -- these are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much.

Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now

About this talk

Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.


When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? Fill in the blanks. So, you know, sustainability, small planet. Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. And, you know, built the society that we now live in. Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws.

One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. We're using up about five planets. If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. Clearly we don't have 10 planets. Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? We don't have that. So that's one problem.

The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. And then, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. And people simply do not have enough to survive. This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. And there's more and more people on the way. Right? So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people.

So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. And they may not want to live exactly like us. They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable.

Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. I don't need to go into that. But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable, on the other hand we have the unimaginable. We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. We don't know how to do this yet.

So what's Worldchanging? Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. Right? A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, right, but most people haven't. So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried and true examples. Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right?

So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. We're already an urban planet, that's especially true in the developed world. And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ... Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. So you have density. You also have growth management. You leave aside what is natural to be natural.

This is in Portland. That is an actual development. That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. They've bounded the city with a line. Nature, city. Nothing changes. Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. Right? You can also start to change what you build. This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, et cetera, and over time cost less. Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much.

But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is -- as information technologies develop -- you can start to have smart places. You can start to know where things are. When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. When you share them, you end up using less. So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car?

Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. We could just re-label things. This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. How we build things can change as well. This is a bio-morphic building. It takes its inspiration in form from life. Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. There's a lot of this stuff happening, it's really pretty remarkable. I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. We're starting to cover this more and more. There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities.

But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong, it's totally wrong. It's every seven days. So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. They don't have existing infrastructure, they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways. Right?

So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot, and cost enormous amounts of money. Right? So I rather like this picture here. I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies.

The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. Right? And those things lead to things like this. This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap sort of hacked together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings -- has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back.

So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. It's doing something new. There's new things happening. There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "City of God?" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way.

You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways. In ways that haven't happened before. And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities.

And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. Another world is possible. And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? We tweak that a lot. We talk about how another world isn't just possible, another world's here. That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. How many people knew of Lula before today? OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. I would keep your eye on this fellow.

Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call serious play. We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. This is from "A Force More Powerful." It's a little screenshot. "A Force More Powerful" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. Here's another one. This is from a game called "Food Force," which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. We get so little news about the developing world, that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible.

Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff et cetera, what do you get? Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. You get -- this is a building in Hyderabad, India. It's the greenest building in the world. You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. You get access to distance medicine. These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. You get new tools for people in the developing world. These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. These are refrigerators that require no electricity, they're pot within a pot design.

And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. Here's a way of transporting water. I just love this, you know -- I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? I mean, that's a great design. This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? Seriously -- give that one a hand, it's pretty great. And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right?

We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. How do we help people like that? Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. New models for pedagogy for the displaced. And we have new tools. This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. Does anyone know what this is?

Audience: It detects landmines.

Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know?

(Applause)

I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will. Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. I think that, in fact, that "all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening." I hope that that turns out to be true. The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Winter Olympic Sports: Sledding

Winter Olympic Sports: Sledding
Hosted by: Rebecca Brayton
Evolved from sleds used for travel, sledding sports began in the 1870s in Switzerland. Bobsled, luge and skeleton were developed shortly after, and have since gained popularity through such international competitions as the Olympic Games. The beginning of a sled race is crucial for various reasons. Sled racers must gain momentum at the start to get to a competitive racing speed. Also, mistakes near the beginning of a run are especially taxing, because they can potentially decrease the speed of the sled for the remainder of the track. In this video, WatchMojo.com prepares you for the Olympics by showing you more about the three sledding sports: Bobsled, Luge and Skeleton.

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