[Music]
[Applause]
I’d like to invite you to close your
eyes and come with me on a journey into
the future with your eyes closed I want
you to picture the future of the
environment 50 years from now in the
year 2060 8 what is it that you see what
do you smell what do you hear
you might be envisioning a lush green
field maybe a dark and fragrant forest
filled with birdsong or maybe you see a
sparkling blue lake and hear the sound
of children’s laughter echoing as they
skip stones across its surface okay you
can open your eyes so you might have
been envisioning something like this
beautiful forest but most of us when
were asked about the future of the
environment 50 years from now see
something that looks a little bit more
like this we see images of dystopian
collapse in degradation
maybe coral reefs that are bleached and
devoid of biodiversity clear-cut forests
or pavement and suburban sprawl as far
as your eye can see and it makes sense
why we think about those dystopian
images of collapse and degradation right
we are bombarded by those images and the
massive radical pace of anthropogenic
change brings serious concern about the
future of the planet but if we merely
extrapolate current trends out into the
future it runs the risk of being
self-fulfilling we know that people make
choices based on what they believe about
society and what they expect for the
future
it’s like steering a car you’re gonna
steer towards what you’re looking at so
if the only visions that we have of the
future are ones that look like this we
are more likely to steer towards those
negative visions
even if we know that they’re not the
ones that we want I spent the first part
of my career working on increasingly
precise descriptions of environmental
problems that somebody out there should
do something about the problem is the
somebody was always vague and what we
should do about it it just wasn’t
convincing I mean no one not even my mom
was reading my scientific papers and
saying wow Elena you are so right I
should really change how I’m behaving I
was boring and I was depressing myself
and I had to work on solutions so here’s
what I want to say to you today we can
achieve a good Anthrop Essene
Anthropocene is the name that some
scientists use to describe the current
era an era in which humans are a
dominant force on the planet and to me a
good Anthropocene is one that is more
just more prosperous and more
biologically diverse than the world
we’re living in today now such a future
it’s likely to be radically different
than the world that we live in today
people might have different values
different worldviews there might be
different cultures all sorts of
different things that affect the social
norms and the very fabric of our lives
might be different and the problems that
envisioning such a world while
incredibly appealing is really difficult
how do you imagine something so
radically different but it’s really
important that we try stories are
incredibly powerful to us and images are
incredibly powerful to us they do help
to create our reality as much as they
explain it so when we tell positive
stories about the future they helped to
create the very future that we’re using
them to forecast and I think that those
stories that were telling about positive
anthropo scenes they need to do three
things for us first they need to
illuminate some realistic pathways by
which we can get from where we are today
to a better future second they need to
show us
a different place for humanity on the
planet right now most of our images of
humanity on the planet are either the
source of all environmental evil or gods
of the technology that they’re going to
save us but I think we need something
different something more about being a
humble part of a bigger biological
community and third those stories need
to inspire us the work of the kind of
change that we need to do it’s not easy
and we’re gonna need all the inspiration
we can get to get there the global
scientific community has been working on
developing positive stories about the
future positive global scenarios but
thus far I think we’ve fallen far short
of achieving
those three goals and doing what we can
do let me tell you a little bit about
why I was involved in helping to build
the UN Millennium ecosystem assessment
scenarios about 15 years ago and one of
the things that we did was easily
imagine differences between different
futures so here in this case a world in
which people work together to try to
solve their environmental problems or
world in which rich people build walls
to keep out the poor and protect their
own I probably don’t have to tell you
that the world in which people work
together turns out a lot better than the
world in which people don’t that’s not
very surprising but it’s also not very
insightful it overestimates the power of
one single change working together to
bring about everything that we
anticipate or want out of a better
future there’s two other problems with
the way that we’re currently building
global scenarios one is that we tend to
follow the same handful of pathways and
drivers to the future so we think that
things like technology the way we
interact with one another how we feel
about the environment versus development
that those are the only things that are
going to affect how we walk from today
into the world of the future and we end
up with the same handful of stories over
and over again and the third problem
with the way that we’re building current
global scenarios is that we think a lot
about the endgame so in a positive
scenario we might think about the
sustainable development goal
achieved in every country on earth and
everyone’s living happily ever after and
we spend a lot of time thinking about
what that happy world is going to look
like but we don’t spend very much time
thinking about the pathway by which
we’re going to get from here to there
and so when it comes to making the kinds
of hard choices that we’re going to need
to make we fall flat because we haven’t
thought through what those choices are
going to look like so we need positive
stories about the future but they’re
hard to build how are we going to build
stories that are positive inspiring
maybe even radical fundamentally
realistic that’s a lot to ask I think we
can do it by starting with things that
people are already doing today to make
their communities better as we look
around in different communities we see
that as people are increasingly facing
threats to nature and threats to society
they engage in new projects radical ways
of living new ways of thinking to try to
make things better for themselves and we
call those things seeds of good and
fraught the scenes and I think we can
look to them to help us tell better
stories so my colleagues and I have been
working with the seeds of a good
anthropo Singh’s idea and we’ve used an
international participatory process to
collect seeds 500 of them from all
around the world and we use them for a
number of different things so we’ve
developed a database of information
about them all the information that
you’d need to know why they emerge why
do they grow how do they cause change
how do they inspire change in other
faraway cities or how do they inspire
different kinds of change in the own
city in their own cities or rural areas
where they have image and we’re also
using them to develop a new method for
telling scenarios so let me tell you
about two of the seeds just so I can
give you an example so you can know a
little bit more about what I’m talking
about
so one happened in the city of
Copenhagen which back about 10 years ago
decided that they were going to go
organic they were going to have 90% of
all of the food that they served in
every public cafeteria
be organic every hospital every
government building every school they
really quickly realized that they
couldn’t just serve the same food
they’ve been serving before it was far
too expensive they blow their budget
immediately so they started to serve
different food less meat more vegetables
that meant that they could source food
locally and when they could source food
locally that meant they could prepare it
freshly instead of having cafeteria
workers reheating prepared foods and
that meant more training for cafeteria
workers so what I love about this
particular seed is it’s a great example
of how one small focus change about food
led to so many knock-on effects on other
positive things for the city of
Copenhagen and one more example the
story of a group called health and
harmony their project that works in
Indonesian Borneo were they partner with
local communities and they provide
low-cost health care in exchange for
communities commitment to reduce
deforestation what they found since 2007
an 88% reduction in illegal logging
complete stabilization of all primary
forests loss their regrowing 20,000
hectares of new forests they’ve
protected habitat for 2,500 critically
endangered orangutans and even more
they’re having a massive impact on human
health they have achieved a stunning 90
percent decrease in child mortality for
children under the age of five so how
did they do this right how did Kinari
web and her team figure out that the way
to protect forests was to provide health
care so did something else that was
really remarkable they invented
something that kinery calls radical
listening they went to these communities
and just listened tell us what is your
life like what problems do you face
what’s your role in this community tell
us and what they heard was people saying
we don’t want to cut down the forest
we’re desperate for medicine for our
wives for mothers for our children and
that’s when the logic connected
we could provide health care in exchange
for reducing deforestation so I love a
few things about this story one of the
things I love about this story is that
when I was building the millennium
assessment scenarios it never would have
occurred to me to start a story about
the environment with fixing human health
and another thing that I loved about the
story and one that also wouldn’t have
occurred to me is that it starts with
listening with going to a community with
humility and asking what do you need who
are you and to me that’s incredibly
inspiring so we’re taking seeds like
these and many many other seeds and
using them to develop a method to tell
better stories about the future how do
we do that we start with a few seeds and
we ask what makes these seeds unique
what kinds of challenges are they trying
to solve how are they going about doing
it and when you sort of mash them
together and we confront them with the
sorts of challenges that we’re facing in
the Anthropocene and we ask about how
they thrive under those situations and
that helps us describe a story about how
we start from the seeds of today and get
to a better world of tomorrow and I
think that the salt is a number of the
problems that we’re facing with the
current global scenarios because they
start from things that people are
already doing they’re realistic because
they start with the very interesting and
novel things that people are doing
they’re radical and they feature
different pathways and different drivers
that we never would have thought of on
our own so it gives us something that’s
inspiring that illuminates pathways
that’s realistic and that points towards
a more positive future
so Antoine de saint-exupéry said if you
want to build a ship don’t start with
collecting wood cutting the planks and
assigning work but awaken people the
longing for a wide and open sea and I
think maybe it’s time for us to stop
cutting planks and assigning work for me
to stop working on increasingly precise
descriptions of environmental problems
and for us to start thinking about the
radical inspiring stories of the future
that might give us
hope and awakening us a great and
hopeful longing for a good a proper
scene
thank you [Applause]
[Applause]
I’d like to invite you to close your
eyes and come with me on a journey into
the future with your eyes closed I want
you to picture the future of the
environment 50 years from now in the
year 2060 8 what is it that you see what
do you smell what do you hear
you might be envisioning a lush green
field maybe a dark and fragrant forest
filled with birdsong or maybe you see a
sparkling blue lake and hear the sound
of children’s laughter echoing as they
skip stones across its surface okay you
can open your eyes so you might have
been envisioning something like this
beautiful forest but most of us when
were asked about the future of the
environment 50 years from now see
something that looks a little bit more
like this we see images of dystopian
collapse in degradation
maybe coral reefs that are bleached and
devoid of biodiversity clear-cut forests
or pavement and suburban sprawl as far
as your eye can see and it makes sense
why we think about those dystopian
images of collapse and degradation right
we are bombarded by those images and the
massive radical pace of anthropogenic
change brings serious concern about the
future of the planet but if we merely
extrapolate current trends out into the
future it runs the risk of being
self-fulfilling we know that people make
choices based on what they believe about
society and what they expect for the
future
it’s like steering a car you’re gonna
steer towards what you’re looking at so
if the only visions that we have of the
future are ones that look like this we
are more likely to steer towards those
negative visions
even if we know that they’re not the
ones that we want I spent the first part
of my career working on increasingly
precise descriptions of environmental
problems that somebody out there should
do something about the problem is the
somebody was always vague and what we
should do about it it just wasn’t
convincing I mean no one not even my mom
was reading my scientific papers and
saying wow Elena you are so right I
should really change how I’m behaving I
was boring and I was depressing myself
and I had to work on solutions so here’s
what I want to say to you today we can
achieve a good Anthrop Essene
Anthropocene is the name that some
scientists use to describe the current
era an era in which humans are a
dominant force on the planet and to me a
good Anthropocene is one that is more
just more prosperous and more
biologically diverse than the world
we’re living in today now such a future
it’s likely to be radically different
than the world that we live in today
people might have different values
different worldviews there might be
different cultures all sorts of
different things that affect the social
norms and the very fabric of our lives
might be different and the problems that
envisioning such a world while
incredibly appealing is really difficult
how do you imagine something so
radically different but it’s really
important that we try stories are
incredibly powerful to us and images are
incredibly powerful to us they do help
to create our reality as much as they
explain it so when we tell positive
stories about the future they helped to
create the very future that we’re using
them to forecast and I think that those
stories that were telling about positive
anthropo scenes they need to do three
things for us first they need to
illuminate some realistic pathways by
which we can get from where we are today
to a better future second they need to
show us
a different place for humanity on the
planet right now most of our images of
humanity on the planet are either the
source of all environmental evil or gods
of the technology that they’re going to
save us but I think we need something
different something more about being a
humble part of a bigger biological
community and third those stories need
to inspire us the work of the kind of
change that we need to do it’s not easy
and we’re gonna need all the inspiration
we can get to get there the global
scientific community has been working on
developing positive stories about the
future positive global scenarios but
thus far I think we’ve fallen far short
of achieving
those three goals and doing what we can
do let me tell you a little bit about
why I was involved in helping to build
the UN Millennium ecosystem assessment
scenarios about 15 years ago and one of
the things that we did was easily
imagine differences between different
futures so here in this case a world in
which people work together to try to
solve their environmental problems or
world in which rich people build walls
to keep out the poor and protect their
own I probably don’t have to tell you
that the world in which people work
together turns out a lot better than the
world in which people don’t that’s not
very surprising but it’s also not very
insightful it overestimates the power of
one single change working together to
bring about everything that we
anticipate or want out of a better
future there’s two other problems with
the way that we’re currently building
global scenarios one is that we tend to
follow the same handful of pathways and
drivers to the future so we think that
things like technology the way we
interact with one another how we feel
about the environment versus development
that those are the only things that are
going to affect how we walk from today
into the world of the future and we end
up with the same handful of stories over
and over again and the third problem
with the way that we’re building current
global scenarios is that we think a lot
about the endgame so in a positive
scenario we might think about the
sustainable development goal
achieved in every country on earth and
everyone’s living happily ever after and
we spend a lot of time thinking about
what that happy world is going to look
like but we don’t spend very much time
thinking about the pathway by which
we’re going to get from here to there
and so when it comes to making the kinds
of hard choices that we’re going to need
to make we fall flat because we haven’t
thought through what those choices are
going to look like so we need positive
stories about the future but they’re
hard to build how are we going to build
stories that are positive inspiring
maybe even radical fundamentally
realistic that’s a lot to ask I think we
can do it by starting with things that
people are already doing today to make
their communities better as we look
around in different communities we see
that as people are increasingly facing
threats to nature and threats to society
they engage in new projects radical ways
of living new ways of thinking to try to
make things better for themselves and we
call those things seeds of good and
fraught the scenes and I think we can
look to them to help us tell better
stories so my colleagues and I have been
working with the seeds of a good
anthropo Singh’s idea and we’ve used an
international participatory process to
collect seeds 500 of them from all
around the world and we use them for a
number of different things so we’ve
developed a database of information
about them all the information that
you’d need to know why they emerge why
do they grow how do they cause change
how do they inspire change in other
faraway cities or how do they inspire
different kinds of change in the own
city in their own cities or rural areas
where they have image and we’re also
using them to develop a new method for
telling scenarios so let me tell you
about two of the seeds just so I can
give you an example so you can know a
little bit more about what I’m talking
about
so one happened in the city of
Copenhagen which back about 10 years ago
decided that they were going to go
organic they were going to have 90% of
all of the food that they served in
every public cafeteria
be organic every hospital every
government building every school they
really quickly realized that they
couldn’t just serve the same food
they’ve been serving before it was far
too expensive they blow their budget
immediately so they started to serve
different food less meat more vegetables
that meant that they could source food
locally and when they could source food
locally that meant they could prepare it
freshly instead of having cafeteria
workers reheating prepared foods and
that meant more training for cafeteria
workers so what I love about this
particular seed is it’s a great example
of how one small focus change about food
led to so many knock-on effects on other
positive things for the city of
Copenhagen and one more example the
story of a group called health and
harmony their project that works in
Indonesian Borneo were they partner with
local communities and they provide
low-cost health care in exchange for
communities commitment to reduce
deforestation what they found since 2007
an 88% reduction in illegal logging
complete stabilization of all primary
forests loss their regrowing 20,000
hectares of new forests they’ve
protected habitat for 2,500 critically
endangered orangutans and even more
they’re having a massive impact on human
health they have achieved a stunning 90
percent decrease in child mortality for
children under the age of five so how
did they do this right how did Kinari
web and her team figure out that the way
to protect forests was to provide health
care so did something else that was
really remarkable they invented
something that kinery calls radical
listening they went to these communities
and just listened tell us what is your
life like what problems do you face
what’s your role in this community tell
us and what they heard was people saying
we don’t want to cut down the forest
we’re desperate for medicine for our
wives for mothers for our children and
that’s when the logic connected
we could provide health care in exchange
for reducing deforestation so I love a
few things about this story one of the
things I love about this story is that
when I was building the millennium
assessment scenarios it never would have
occurred to me to start a story about
the environment with fixing human health
and another thing that I loved about the
story and one that also wouldn’t have
occurred to me is that it starts with
listening with going to a community with
humility and asking what do you need who
are you and to me that’s incredibly
inspiring so we’re taking seeds like
these and many many other seeds and
using them to develop a method to tell
better stories about the future how do
we do that we start with a few seeds and
we ask what makes these seeds unique
what kinds of challenges are they trying
to solve how are they going about doing
it and when you sort of mash them
together and we confront them with the
sorts of challenges that we’re facing in
the Anthropocene and we ask about how
they thrive under those situations and
that helps us describe a story about how
we start from the seeds of today and get
to a better world of tomorrow and I
think that the salt is a number of the
problems that we’re facing with the
current global scenarios because they
start from things that people are
already doing they’re realistic because
they start with the very interesting and
novel things that people are doing
they’re radical and they feature
different pathways and different drivers
that we never would have thought of on
our own so it gives us something that’s
inspiring that illuminates pathways
that’s realistic and that points towards
a more positive future
so Antoine de saint-exupéry said if you
want to build a ship don’t start with
collecting wood cutting the planks and
assigning work but awaken people the
longing for a wide and open sea and I
think maybe it’s time for us to stop
cutting planks and assigning work for me
to stop working on increasingly precise
descriptions of environmental problems
and for us to start thinking about the
radical inspiring stories of the future
that might give us
hope and awakening us a great and
hopeful longing for a good a proper
scene
thank you [Applause]
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