[Music]
this is a story that really begins here
standing in the middle of this photo
with her message held high is my mum and
to her left is an awkward scraggly mop
of hair that is unfortunately me we are
standing at a rally for action on
climate change in the run-up to the 15th
UN climate conference now despite
everything that my mum taught me by the
time that I had arrived at University I
had successfully pushed the threat of
climate change to the back of my mind it
can be such an overwhelming problem that
I had taken the failsafe approach of
putting my head firmly in the sand in
other words I had put it somewhere near
the bottom of my very long list of
things that I would eventually get
around to addressing and so it wasn’t
until I sat in one of my first
university classes that that all came
rushing back the assignment that we’ve
been given was to design a structure
that would help protect the city from
rising sea levels and it completely
freaked me out it became this really
sobering moment I suddenly remembered
standing at this rally in fact I
realised that six years had passed and
we were still facing the same problem I
suddenly wondered if we were a
generation who are going to spend their
careers trying to remedy the
environmental disasters that we humans
were responsible for creating and so
this experience coupled with the
articles that we were being given to
read by environmentalists such as Bill
McKibben and theorists such as Jerry
Rifkin became this sort of catalyst that
kicked me into action I became hungry to
understand what was causing our climate
to change but more importantly what I
really wanted to know is what can we as
individuals do to have a positive impact
on the problem and so I did what we all
do when we have a burning question that
we desperately want the answer to I
googled it and one of the first links
that came up was to Vice President Al
Gore’s climate leadership camps it was
this weekend long retreat to be held in
Cedar Rapids Iowa and the goal according
to the website was to give participants
an in-depth understanding of the problem
and to equip them with the tools they
needed to be a leader within their
community and so without second thought
I signed up and I booked my plane ticket
what I saw and what I learned during
that short weekend blew me away
I met Indies here as young as 12 had
persuaded their parents and that
teachers to take them I learned about
shatters cat Martinez the 17 year old
environmentalist from Colorado who is
currently suing the US federal
government along with 21 other
plaintiffs for violating their right to
life liberty and the pursuit of
happiness he spoke at the UN in 2015 and
he is the youth director of his
organization earth Guardians I learned
about boy and slap the 21 year old
environmentalist an inventor whose
desire for a system of cleaning plastic
waste from the oceans has already raised
more than two million dollars in support
for his organization the ocean cleanup
and I learn about Isabel and Malati
Woodson the 15 and 13 year old sisters
who are campaigning and successfully
changing policy to ban the use of
plastic bags on their island of Bali in
Indonesia and so it’s fair to say that I
left that weekend with this newfound
sense of optimism because what I saw was
a generation who were keen to learn as
much as they could about the
environmental threats we face a
generation who were eager to educate
others and to inspire action on a bigger
scale than we’ve seen before
but most importantly I left that weekend
with an answer to that question that I
have been asking what can we do as
individuals to have a positive impact on
our changing climate and the answer
breaks down into three really simple
actions the first one is that we must
educate both ourselves and those around
us on the reality of the situation we
must engage with the science and look at
the evidence of the changes that are
occurring when I got back from that
short weekend I wanted to shout about
what I had learned from a mountaintop
but I didn’t have a mountain so instead
I reached out to my brother Jack he is a
filmmaker and a photographer and before
I had arrived at university we had spent
four years traveling and making films
for a popular online blog whoo jazz gap
we decided together that we would make a
film that documented the very real
effects that climate change is having on
our planet today and so very ambitiously
we typed out an email to the World
Wildlife Fund and to our amazement they
gave us the opportunity to join them on
a scientific research trip
traveling to Greenland we would be there
to witness and to record the
increasingly rapid decline of
Greenland’s ice sheet and surrounding
sea ice we helped download time-lapse
data of one of the world’s fastest
retreating glaciers these two cameras
take a picture every 30 minutes of the
front of yaacov sovereign Galatia
scientists use this data to monitor and
to record the rapid changes that are
occurring as a result of a warmer global
temperature and we spent the night
camping on a ledge of ice overlooking
this glass year and all we could hear
was the eerie cracking noise as large
chunks of ice carved off the front and
crashed into the water below we also
helped install and download the data
from scientific monitoring stay
out on the Greenland ice sheet this
experiment has been running for more
than 20 years and during that time it is
measured more than a hundred and forty
feet of melt to give you a sense of
scale that is the equivalent height of
ten double-decker buses after green on
we traveled to London where we joined
the London climate March we filmed it
and we did this all in the run-up to the
UN Paris climate conference we cut the
entire film together and we shared it
onto the blog that my brother and I run
and we were mind blown by the experience
over a million young people watched it
within the first three months of it
going online it turned out the Internet
was a mountain to shout from in fact it
was better it gave us a platform to
connect with a global audience and to
start a conversation around something
that mattered the second action is to
organize because when we unite under one
goal we significantly increase our
chances of achieving it we all have a
right to free speech and a right to
peaceful protest and we should use it in
fact when you look back at the history
of some of the greatest social movements
whether it is the fight for women’s
rights abolitionism or anti-apartheid
some of their greatest victories were
made when a critical mass took to the
streets to peacefully demand change in
fact the women’s march that happened at
the beginning of this year is a great
example of the power of demonstration
more than four million men women and
children took to the streets to
peacefully demand change and their
voices ignited a global movement that is
just getting started and so encouraging
your family or your friends to join you
on local marches or rallies is a really
great way to begin by organizing even
mister Vice President Al Gore still
makes it out to every March he can we
can also interpret this action in other
ways right now as I speak our world
leaders are meeting in Germany for the
23rd UN climate conference – this
gasps their commitments to climate
change the last action is to lead as in
to lead by example we all have the
capacity in the approach that we take to
our work and our day-to-day life to make
a change that has a more positive impact
on the environment around us and this
isn’t a change that is a sacrifice in
fact they can often have a more
beneficial impact on our lives as a
group of students at Parsons School of
Design we were recently given the
opportunity by the New York Department
of Transport and by the school to
replace two car parking spaces in the
middle of Manhattan with a temporary
public seating structure and so we
started this project by asking ourselves
what it would look like to take a more
sustainable approach to building it and
after diving into a bunch of research
and a lot of back-and-forth we designed
and built a 40-foot structure made from
360 pieces of bamboo bamboo is an
incredibly strong organic material when
it grows is sequester’s carbon dioxide
and it replaces it with roughly 30% more
oxygen than an equivalent stand of
hardwood trees when it’s used correctly
it has the tensile strength of steel and
the compressive strength of concrete in
fact in countries such as Vietnam
Indonesia China and Japan this plan has
been used to make everything from homes
to schools and even bridges yet in the
u.s. despite the fact we can grow it
here as a crop we rarely see it the
frame of our structure has 75 plants
which create a natural divide between
the road and the sidewalk
each plant hangs in a planter made from
recycled plastic bottle fibers adding
vegetation to our cities helps reduce a
phenomena known as the urban heat island
effect and it helps absorb stormwater
runoff which often leads to the
pollution of our local waterways the
result is a new space in the city that
is open to
every one this little section of road
that was once dominated by two parked
cars becomes a hub of social activity
throughout the day and at night the
solar panels that we mounted to the
frame provide energy that light up the
plants we really wanted this space to
start a conversation around alternative
sources of energy and more sustainable
methods of building and to our amazement
despite it being a student-led project
it was featured on the front page of
design boom and reviewed by the New York
Times throughout this whole process I
have learned that creativity is a
powerful tool for impact you don’t need
expensive equipment and you don’t need
to be a professional artist
we can use creativity through film and
photography to better inform and to
activate those around us and we can use
it through design to reframe complex
problems and imagine new and exciting
solutions to solving them I’ve also
learned that we all have the capacity to
use our voice and start a conversation
around something that matters find
something that you are passionate about
something that you think deserves more
attention preferably the environment and
use your voice and the resources around
you to educate organize and lead by
example
[Applause]
this is a story that really begins here
standing in the middle of this photo
with her message held high is my mum and
to her left is an awkward scraggly mop
of hair that is unfortunately me we are
standing at a rally for action on
climate change in the run-up to the 15th
UN climate conference now despite
everything that my mum taught me by the
time that I had arrived at University I
had successfully pushed the threat of
climate change to the back of my mind it
can be such an overwhelming problem that
I had taken the failsafe approach of
putting my head firmly in the sand in
other words I had put it somewhere near
the bottom of my very long list of
things that I would eventually get
around to addressing and so it wasn’t
until I sat in one of my first
university classes that that all came
rushing back the assignment that we’ve
been given was to design a structure
that would help protect the city from
rising sea levels and it completely
freaked me out it became this really
sobering moment I suddenly remembered
standing at this rally in fact I
realised that six years had passed and
we were still facing the same problem I
suddenly wondered if we were a
generation who are going to spend their
careers trying to remedy the
environmental disasters that we humans
were responsible for creating and so
this experience coupled with the
articles that we were being given to
read by environmentalists such as Bill
McKibben and theorists such as Jerry
Rifkin became this sort of catalyst that
kicked me into action I became hungry to
understand what was causing our climate
to change but more importantly what I
really wanted to know is what can we as
individuals do to have a positive impact
on the problem and so I did what we all
do when we have a burning question that
we desperately want the answer to I
googled it and one of the first links
that came up was to Vice President Al
Gore’s climate leadership camps it was
this weekend long retreat to be held in
Cedar Rapids Iowa and the goal according
to the website was to give participants
an in-depth understanding of the problem
and to equip them with the tools they
needed to be a leader within their
community and so without second thought
I signed up and I booked my plane ticket
what I saw and what I learned during
that short weekend blew me away
I met Indies here as young as 12 had
persuaded their parents and that
teachers to take them I learned about
shatters cat Martinez the 17 year old
environmentalist from Colorado who is
currently suing the US federal
government along with 21 other
plaintiffs for violating their right to
life liberty and the pursuit of
happiness he spoke at the UN in 2015 and
he is the youth director of his
organization earth Guardians I learned
about boy and slap the 21 year old
environmentalist an inventor whose
desire for a system of cleaning plastic
waste from the oceans has already raised
more than two million dollars in support
for his organization the ocean cleanup
and I learn about Isabel and Malati
Woodson the 15 and 13 year old sisters
who are campaigning and successfully
changing policy to ban the use of
plastic bags on their island of Bali in
Indonesia and so it’s fair to say that I
left that weekend with this newfound
sense of optimism because what I saw was
a generation who were keen to learn as
much as they could about the
environmental threats we face a
generation who were eager to educate
others and to inspire action on a bigger
scale than we’ve seen before
but most importantly I left that weekend
with an answer to that question that I
have been asking what can we do as
individuals to have a positive impact on
our changing climate and the answer
breaks down into three really simple
actions the first one is that we must
educate both ourselves and those around
us on the reality of the situation we
must engage with the science and look at
the evidence of the changes that are
occurring when I got back from that
short weekend I wanted to shout about
what I had learned from a mountaintop
but I didn’t have a mountain so instead
I reached out to my brother Jack he is a
filmmaker and a photographer and before
I had arrived at university we had spent
four years traveling and making films
for a popular online blog whoo jazz gap
we decided together that we would make a
film that documented the very real
effects that climate change is having on
our planet today and so very ambitiously
we typed out an email to the World
Wildlife Fund and to our amazement they
gave us the opportunity to join them on
a scientific research trip
traveling to Greenland we would be there
to witness and to record the
increasingly rapid decline of
Greenland’s ice sheet and surrounding
sea ice we helped download time-lapse
data of one of the world’s fastest
retreating glaciers these two cameras
take a picture every 30 minutes of the
front of yaacov sovereign Galatia
scientists use this data to monitor and
to record the rapid changes that are
occurring as a result of a warmer global
temperature and we spent the night
camping on a ledge of ice overlooking
this glass year and all we could hear
was the eerie cracking noise as large
chunks of ice carved off the front and
crashed into the water below we also
helped install and download the data
from scientific monitoring stay
out on the Greenland ice sheet this
experiment has been running for more
than 20 years and during that time it is
measured more than a hundred and forty
feet of melt to give you a sense of
scale that is the equivalent height of
ten double-decker buses after green on
we traveled to London where we joined
the London climate March we filmed it
and we did this all in the run-up to the
UN Paris climate conference we cut the
entire film together and we shared it
onto the blog that my brother and I run
and we were mind blown by the experience
over a million young people watched it
within the first three months of it
going online it turned out the Internet
was a mountain to shout from in fact it
was better it gave us a platform to
connect with a global audience and to
start a conversation around something
that mattered the second action is to
organize because when we unite under one
goal we significantly increase our
chances of achieving it we all have a
right to free speech and a right to
peaceful protest and we should use it in
fact when you look back at the history
of some of the greatest social movements
whether it is the fight for women’s
rights abolitionism or anti-apartheid
some of their greatest victories were
made when a critical mass took to the
streets to peacefully demand change in
fact the women’s march that happened at
the beginning of this year is a great
example of the power of demonstration
more than four million men women and
children took to the streets to
peacefully demand change and their
voices ignited a global movement that is
just getting started and so encouraging
your family or your friends to join you
on local marches or rallies is a really
great way to begin by organizing even
mister Vice President Al Gore still
makes it out to every March he can we
can also interpret this action in other
ways right now as I speak our world
leaders are meeting in Germany for the
23rd UN climate conference – this
gasps their commitments to climate
change the last action is to lead as in
to lead by example we all have the
capacity in the approach that we take to
our work and our day-to-day life to make
a change that has a more positive impact
on the environment around us and this
isn’t a change that is a sacrifice in
fact they can often have a more
beneficial impact on our lives as a
group of students at Parsons School of
Design we were recently given the
opportunity by the New York Department
of Transport and by the school to
replace two car parking spaces in the
middle of Manhattan with a temporary
public seating structure and so we
started this project by asking ourselves
what it would look like to take a more
sustainable approach to building it and
after diving into a bunch of research
and a lot of back-and-forth we designed
and built a 40-foot structure made from
360 pieces of bamboo bamboo is an
incredibly strong organic material when
it grows is sequester’s carbon dioxide
and it replaces it with roughly 30% more
oxygen than an equivalent stand of
hardwood trees when it’s used correctly
it has the tensile strength of steel and
the compressive strength of concrete in
fact in countries such as Vietnam
Indonesia China and Japan this plan has
been used to make everything from homes
to schools and even bridges yet in the
u.s. despite the fact we can grow it
here as a crop we rarely see it the
frame of our structure has 75 plants
which create a natural divide between
the road and the sidewalk
each plant hangs in a planter made from
recycled plastic bottle fibers adding
vegetation to our cities helps reduce a
phenomena known as the urban heat island
effect and it helps absorb stormwater
runoff which often leads to the
pollution of our local waterways the
result is a new space in the city that
is open to
every one this little section of road
that was once dominated by two parked
cars becomes a hub of social activity
throughout the day and at night the
solar panels that we mounted to the
frame provide energy that light up the
plants we really wanted this space to
start a conversation around alternative
sources of energy and more sustainable
methods of building and to our amazement
despite it being a student-led project
it was featured on the front page of
design boom and reviewed by the New York
Times throughout this whole process I
have learned that creativity is a
powerful tool for impact you don’t need
expensive equipment and you don’t need
to be a professional artist
we can use creativity through film and
photography to better inform and to
activate those around us and we can use
it through design to reframe complex
problems and imagine new and exciting
solutions to solving them I’ve also
learned that we all have the capacity to
use our voice and start a conversation
around something that matters find
something that you are passionate about
something that you think deserves more
attention preferably the environment and
use your voice and the resources around
you to educate organize and lead by
example
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: