[Music]
in 1950 less than 5% of all major
seafood species were in a state of
collapse and the state of collapse means
that you’re currently at 10% or less of
what would be considered a healthy yield
of that species in the ocean now by 2050
it’s expected that nearly 100% of all
major seafood species will be in a state
of collapse
now you couple that with the fact that
our freshwater resources are already in
decline and that the world’s human
population is expected to increase from
its current seven-and-a-half billion to
nine and a half or ten billion so what
is 2050 look like with virtually no
seafood left less freshwater and two
billion more people on the planet I have
no idea but I’ll leave that up for you
to imagine in your own mind regardless
though if we want to leave this world a
better place for the people that we care
about the most we have got to change the
way that we think I’m here today to
introduce you to a really cool new way
of growing food called aquaponics and to
frame a strategy for changing the way
that we think on a mass scale and it
starts right here in our city so if you
lived in the 1980s or below you had
never heard of a species of fish called
tilapia and you’ve probably never seen
one with his head on before
now right now tilapia is one of the most
popularly consumed seafood products on
the planet
so why in 40 years did it go from total
obscurity to everybody knowing what it
is well as the oceans stocks were
declining worldwide but the demand for
seafood products was on the rise we had
to start farming fish which is a good
thing because if we want to let the
ocean species rebound we better start
growing fish ourselves now there’s been
some inherent issues with tilapia
farming especially from an environmental
standpoint and if you can imagine let’s
say you put a million fish into a pond
and you’re feeding them to get them up
to market size quick and they’re
producing waste in the water those ways
start to accumulate and become and that
makes the water become toxic for the
fish so what you would do is you would
discharge a bunch of that dirty water
and you would bring in precious fresh
water to re to top up the pond and to
make it safe at the fish again so your
farming fish which is a good thing but
you’re still wasting fresh water so in
the late 1980s the University of virgin
islands started developing a technology
that we now know is aquaponics and with
aquaponics you raise tilapia or other
freshwater fish in tanks and instead of
discharging that dirty water
you use it to grow plants hydroponically
or without soil and you can see here
that these plants are floating on
styrofoam sheets and there’s little
holes cut in the styrofoam and the roots
grow down into that water filled with
nutrients created by the fish and they
pull the nutrients out of the water
converting them into stems and leaves
and fruits and vegetables
therefore cleaning the water to be
returned back to the fish and this
allows for a hundred percent
recirculation of water so now you’re
farming fish taking pressure off the
oceans you’re recycling the water over
and over again and you’re growing a ton
of fresh produce but even more important
maybe is that this is a beautiful
representation of how an ecosystem works
and it has the potential to help us
mitigate some of these
challenges we face around 2050 but it
also has the potential to change the way
that we think so I’m gonna go into a
little bit of a crazy story back in 2011
I was managing a hydroponics retail
store mostly selling cannabis growing
equipment weed and I was in my early 20s
so you can imagine my life was pretty
cool and one day a guy walks into my
store and people used to come up with
all these crazy excuses to not like let
it be known they’re trying to grow weed
so they’d say hey I’m trying to grow the
most sticky potent tomatoes can you help
me so this guy comes into my store and
he says I just got back from Haiti and
they just had an earthquake that killed
200,000 people in a couple days
so I knew he wasn’t BS in this time and
he asked me if I could help him because
he was taken down there as an urban
planner to rebuild a new village and he
couldn’t get his mind past the fact of
how are these people going to feed
themselves when the aid runs out so he
saw that you could grow plants without
soil using hydroponics because the soil
in Haiti is totally exhausted from
deforestation so he googled hydroponics
and he’s at my store this guy’s name was
Ron Morgan and Ron was a famous
architect here in Charlotte and he
actually ran the bond referendum to get
discovery place and spirit square put
here he converted old warehouses into
City Hall’s design green waste systems
and helped save first ward elementary
back in the 80s so he was a man of great
civic action and here he is in my store
asking me for help to feed people in
Haiti with hydroponics and he had built
this dysfunction a garden in his yard as
a sort of a prototype of what he could
eventually send down there but it wasn’t
working so he asked me to come over to
his house and check it out and I told
him about aquaponics because I had just
been learning about it and he flipped
out he was like yeah that’s really cool
so how about we teach people in Haiti
had a grow fish in vegetables together
while
recycling the water so me and Ron and a
couple of our friends built an
aquaponics system in his yard as an
example and we tricked this thing out we
had a really cool koi pond in the ground
that we crafted out of cement we had
plants floating in plastic pipes
floating in water and lo and behold kids
from all around the neighborhood would
come up to the garden and they were
fascinated with it and remind you we
were doing this as a humanitarian effort
but we had kids wanting to get engaged
with this they wanted to feed the fish
they wanted to harvest the crops so we
started teaching them how to operate it
and in order to operate one you have to
know basic science so we started
teaching them how to check the pH of the
water nitrogen levels had to record the
yields and over the course of the next
couple of weeks
their parents started to make remarks to
us why is my kid talking about science
at dinner he’s 10 years old this is
weird and this started happening over
and over again and we started to realize
aquaponics was not just the cool way to
grow food that was good for the
environment but was a profound teaching
tool for science and math and it was
getting kids engaged and healthy eating
because we’re when they’re invested in
growing their own food they’re
automatically willing to try so through
a series of other crazy events we end up
getting a contract with the North
Carolina Department of Public Safety to
set up an aquaponics program and a
juvenile detention center and for the
last four years I’ve been teaching
incarcerated young men from 14 to 18 had
a grow food using aquaponics and all the
other skills that you learn along the
way that program became pretty
successful and for we knew it we were
installing aquaponics programs in high
schools all around the region we finally
went down to Haiti installed to there
and this thing really started to have a
life of its own so
to give you an example of some of the
really valuable lessons learned to
aquaponics and schools imagine you have
an aquaponics system at let’s say an
elementary school and you bring in these
little baby fish at the beginning of the
year and the students are individually
weighing and measuring each one before
they put them in the tank they’re
feeding them throughout the school year
harvesting all the vegetables that are
growing learning all these cool
scientific principles and one day the
vegetable plants have holes in the
leaves and you find out they have an
insect infestation and so what do you do
when you have insects on plants you
spray them with pesticides so the
student spray down these vegetables and
pesticides then the next day they come
in and all the fish that they’ve been
growing all year are belly-up dead in
the water and the students are you know
they’re devastated what happened well
that comes to find out the pesticides
ran off into the water and killed the
fish just like it happens in real life
they were learning to change the way
they think because the world we live in
is not linear it’s totally dynamic you
make one change and it affects the whole
group of different things that
experience changes the way a young
person views their actions toward the
environment it creates a more
compassionate person toward planet Earth
another example one of our students at
the detention center was in our program
for two years and an administrator was
interviewing him one day they asked what
are you gonna do when you’re released
from here he says I’m gonna open up a
motorcycle shop and they’re like a
motorcycle shop what does that have to
do with aquaponics you’ve learned all
these great skills he says well before I
came in this program I didn’t really
know I can do anything but now I can
repair water pumps I can do plumbing I
know how to grow food
I can manage an ecosystem and I think
motorcycles are really cool and now I
think I can open a motorcycle shop
so it was about embracing opportunities
around hands-on learning that build
confidence within students so after we
had all these high schools on board and
we had the two gardens in Haiti the
genius of Ron Morgan says why don’t we
start connecting all these gardens
together so we could have a garden here
in our city connect to an aquaponic
garden in Haiti and they could be
exchanging all the critical information
around the garden pH levels nitrogen
levels yield information they could
monitor each other’s garden but more
importantly they could talk to each
other and open up conversations around
science food culture why you lived there
while I live here what it means to live
in a place like Haiti and through these
connections you develop people that have
a much better understanding of others
through connecting them through
education one example one of our schools
we connected to Haiti up in Statesville
the French classes in that school in
Statesville got wind that they were
connected to the garden and hey so they
teamed up unbeknownst to us with the
agriculture classes of the school in the
media classes and they developed
aquaponics how-to-videos translated into
French to send down to Haiti to teach
kids about aquaponics now talk about a
French class with some purpose it was
changing the way that they think about
going to school and what we learned with
these aquaponics gardens you can create
smarter people through hands-on learning
you can create more compassionate people
in regards to the environment and others
and you can create healthier people
because they’re engaged in eating all
the products coming out you change the
way that they think
now I mentioned I was going to frame a
strategy for changing the way that we
think on a mass scale let’s say you put
an aquaponics garden in a school and you
had 200 students in that school changing
the way they think
let’s say a city were to upfit 100
schools with aquaponics gardens let’s
say it’s Charlotte I’m from here so
let’s say it’s Charlotte if you had 200
students per school per year and yet 100
of them
that’d be twenty thousand students per
year changing the way they think and in
short order over ten years that would be
200 thousand students who are smarter
who are more compassionate toward the
environment in each other who eat
healthier who are all-around better
people
you know what 200,000 represents in this
city
it’s one quarter of our current
population it effectively is an entire
generation of people who change the way
that they think now what implications
does that have on our city well I had to
imagine what 2050 looks like with
virtually no seafood less fresh water
more people well what if in 2050 we had
plenty of seafood left and all those
endangered species are rebounding and we
have plenty of fresh water and we’ve
avoided all of the Civic unrest that
could have been due to too few resources
to go around for all the people what if
those people living in a better world
the people we care about the most
did it just view Charlotte as a place
with sports teams and international
airport craft breweries but the city
that three decades earlier decided that
they were going to change the way an
entire generation of people think the
city that showed the whole world how to
do it the city that in large part helped
to save the human species and the planet
as we know it now talk about something
to be known for for a city and we
do big bold moves like building 100
gardens that legacy and that identity is
ours to have a year and a half ago my
friend Ron Morgan died of cancer and in
his last days he sat me down
he said Sam I want to thank you for
being a part of the most important
project of my life changing the way
people think about learning about food
about each other was Ron’s most
important project and if we want 2050 to
be a better world for the people we care
about the most
changing the way we think might just be
the most important project for all of
humanity
thank you
[Applause]
in 1950 less than 5% of all major
seafood species were in a state of
collapse and the state of collapse means
that you’re currently at 10% or less of
what would be considered a healthy yield
of that species in the ocean now by 2050
it’s expected that nearly 100% of all
major seafood species will be in a state
of collapse
now you couple that with the fact that
our freshwater resources are already in
decline and that the world’s human
population is expected to increase from
its current seven-and-a-half billion to
nine and a half or ten billion so what
is 2050 look like with virtually no
seafood left less freshwater and two
billion more people on the planet I have
no idea but I’ll leave that up for you
to imagine in your own mind regardless
though if we want to leave this world a
better place for the people that we care
about the most we have got to change the
way that we think I’m here today to
introduce you to a really cool new way
of growing food called aquaponics and to
frame a strategy for changing the way
that we think on a mass scale and it
starts right here in our city so if you
lived in the 1980s or below you had
never heard of a species of fish called
tilapia and you’ve probably never seen
one with his head on before
now right now tilapia is one of the most
popularly consumed seafood products on
the planet
so why in 40 years did it go from total
obscurity to everybody knowing what it
is well as the oceans stocks were
declining worldwide but the demand for
seafood products was on the rise we had
to start farming fish which is a good
thing because if we want to let the
ocean species rebound we better start
growing fish ourselves now there’s been
some inherent issues with tilapia
farming especially from an environmental
standpoint and if you can imagine let’s
say you put a million fish into a pond
and you’re feeding them to get them up
to market size quick and they’re
producing waste in the water those ways
start to accumulate and become and that
makes the water become toxic for the
fish so what you would do is you would
discharge a bunch of that dirty water
and you would bring in precious fresh
water to re to top up the pond and to
make it safe at the fish again so your
farming fish which is a good thing but
you’re still wasting fresh water so in
the late 1980s the University of virgin
islands started developing a technology
that we now know is aquaponics and with
aquaponics you raise tilapia or other
freshwater fish in tanks and instead of
discharging that dirty water
you use it to grow plants hydroponically
or without soil and you can see here
that these plants are floating on
styrofoam sheets and there’s little
holes cut in the styrofoam and the roots
grow down into that water filled with
nutrients created by the fish and they
pull the nutrients out of the water
converting them into stems and leaves
and fruits and vegetables
therefore cleaning the water to be
returned back to the fish and this
allows for a hundred percent
recirculation of water so now you’re
farming fish taking pressure off the
oceans you’re recycling the water over
and over again and you’re growing a ton
of fresh produce but even more important
maybe is that this is a beautiful
representation of how an ecosystem works
and it has the potential to help us
mitigate some of these
challenges we face around 2050 but it
also has the potential to change the way
that we think so I’m gonna go into a
little bit of a crazy story back in 2011
I was managing a hydroponics retail
store mostly selling cannabis growing
equipment weed and I was in my early 20s
so you can imagine my life was pretty
cool and one day a guy walks into my
store and people used to come up with
all these crazy excuses to not like let
it be known they’re trying to grow weed
so they’d say hey I’m trying to grow the
most sticky potent tomatoes can you help
me so this guy comes into my store and
he says I just got back from Haiti and
they just had an earthquake that killed
200,000 people in a couple days
so I knew he wasn’t BS in this time and
he asked me if I could help him because
he was taken down there as an urban
planner to rebuild a new village and he
couldn’t get his mind past the fact of
how are these people going to feed
themselves when the aid runs out so he
saw that you could grow plants without
soil using hydroponics because the soil
in Haiti is totally exhausted from
deforestation so he googled hydroponics
and he’s at my store this guy’s name was
Ron Morgan and Ron was a famous
architect here in Charlotte and he
actually ran the bond referendum to get
discovery place and spirit square put
here he converted old warehouses into
City Hall’s design green waste systems
and helped save first ward elementary
back in the 80s so he was a man of great
civic action and here he is in my store
asking me for help to feed people in
Haiti with hydroponics and he had built
this dysfunction a garden in his yard as
a sort of a prototype of what he could
eventually send down there but it wasn’t
working so he asked me to come over to
his house and check it out and I told
him about aquaponics because I had just
been learning about it and he flipped
out he was like yeah that’s really cool
so how about we teach people in Haiti
had a grow fish in vegetables together
while
recycling the water so me and Ron and a
couple of our friends built an
aquaponics system in his yard as an
example and we tricked this thing out we
had a really cool koi pond in the ground
that we crafted out of cement we had
plants floating in plastic pipes
floating in water and lo and behold kids
from all around the neighborhood would
come up to the garden and they were
fascinated with it and remind you we
were doing this as a humanitarian effort
but we had kids wanting to get engaged
with this they wanted to feed the fish
they wanted to harvest the crops so we
started teaching them how to operate it
and in order to operate one you have to
know basic science so we started
teaching them how to check the pH of the
water nitrogen levels had to record the
yields and over the course of the next
couple of weeks
their parents started to make remarks to
us why is my kid talking about science
at dinner he’s 10 years old this is
weird and this started happening over
and over again and we started to realize
aquaponics was not just the cool way to
grow food that was good for the
environment but was a profound teaching
tool for science and math and it was
getting kids engaged and healthy eating
because we’re when they’re invested in
growing their own food they’re
automatically willing to try so through
a series of other crazy events we end up
getting a contract with the North
Carolina Department of Public Safety to
set up an aquaponics program and a
juvenile detention center and for the
last four years I’ve been teaching
incarcerated young men from 14 to 18 had
a grow food using aquaponics and all the
other skills that you learn along the
way that program became pretty
successful and for we knew it we were
installing aquaponics programs in high
schools all around the region we finally
went down to Haiti installed to there
and this thing really started to have a
life of its own so
to give you an example of some of the
really valuable lessons learned to
aquaponics and schools imagine you have
an aquaponics system at let’s say an
elementary school and you bring in these
little baby fish at the beginning of the
year and the students are individually
weighing and measuring each one before
they put them in the tank they’re
feeding them throughout the school year
harvesting all the vegetables that are
growing learning all these cool
scientific principles and one day the
vegetable plants have holes in the
leaves and you find out they have an
insect infestation and so what do you do
when you have insects on plants you
spray them with pesticides so the
student spray down these vegetables and
pesticides then the next day they come
in and all the fish that they’ve been
growing all year are belly-up dead in
the water and the students are you know
they’re devastated what happened well
that comes to find out the pesticides
ran off into the water and killed the
fish just like it happens in real life
they were learning to change the way
they think because the world we live in
is not linear it’s totally dynamic you
make one change and it affects the whole
group of different things that
experience changes the way a young
person views their actions toward the
environment it creates a more
compassionate person toward planet Earth
another example one of our students at
the detention center was in our program
for two years and an administrator was
interviewing him one day they asked what
are you gonna do when you’re released
from here he says I’m gonna open up a
motorcycle shop and they’re like a
motorcycle shop what does that have to
do with aquaponics you’ve learned all
these great skills he says well before I
came in this program I didn’t really
know I can do anything but now I can
repair water pumps I can do plumbing I
know how to grow food
I can manage an ecosystem and I think
motorcycles are really cool and now I
think I can open a motorcycle shop
so it was about embracing opportunities
around hands-on learning that build
confidence within students so after we
had all these high schools on board and
we had the two gardens in Haiti the
genius of Ron Morgan says why don’t we
start connecting all these gardens
together so we could have a garden here
in our city connect to an aquaponic
garden in Haiti and they could be
exchanging all the critical information
around the garden pH levels nitrogen
levels yield information they could
monitor each other’s garden but more
importantly they could talk to each
other and open up conversations around
science food culture why you lived there
while I live here what it means to live
in a place like Haiti and through these
connections you develop people that have
a much better understanding of others
through connecting them through
education one example one of our schools
we connected to Haiti up in Statesville
the French classes in that school in
Statesville got wind that they were
connected to the garden and hey so they
teamed up unbeknownst to us with the
agriculture classes of the school in the
media classes and they developed
aquaponics how-to-videos translated into
French to send down to Haiti to teach
kids about aquaponics now talk about a
French class with some purpose it was
changing the way that they think about
going to school and what we learned with
these aquaponics gardens you can create
smarter people through hands-on learning
you can create more compassionate people
in regards to the environment and others
and you can create healthier people
because they’re engaged in eating all
the products coming out you change the
way that they think
now I mentioned I was going to frame a
strategy for changing the way that we
think on a mass scale let’s say you put
an aquaponics garden in a school and you
had 200 students in that school changing
the way they think
let’s say a city were to upfit 100
schools with aquaponics gardens let’s
say it’s Charlotte I’m from here so
let’s say it’s Charlotte if you had 200
students per school per year and yet 100
of them
that’d be twenty thousand students per
year changing the way they think and in
short order over ten years that would be
200 thousand students who are smarter
who are more compassionate toward the
environment in each other who eat
healthier who are all-around better
people
you know what 200,000 represents in this
city
it’s one quarter of our current
population it effectively is an entire
generation of people who change the way
that they think now what implications
does that have on our city well I had to
imagine what 2050 looks like with
virtually no seafood less fresh water
more people well what if in 2050 we had
plenty of seafood left and all those
endangered species are rebounding and we
have plenty of fresh water and we’ve
avoided all of the Civic unrest that
could have been due to too few resources
to go around for all the people what if
those people living in a better world
the people we care about the most
did it just view Charlotte as a place
with sports teams and international
airport craft breweries but the city
that three decades earlier decided that
they were going to change the way an
entire generation of people think the
city that showed the whole world how to
do it the city that in large part helped
to save the human species and the planet
as we know it now talk about something
to be known for for a city and we
do big bold moves like building 100
gardens that legacy and that identity is
ours to have a year and a half ago my
friend Ron Morgan died of cancer and in
his last days he sat me down
he said Sam I want to thank you for
being a part of the most important
project of my life changing the way
people think about learning about food
about each other was Ron’s most
important project and if we want 2050 to
be a better world for the people we care
about the most
changing the way we think might just be
the most important project for all of
humanity
thank you
[Applause]
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