Highlights - Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Highlights - Jonathan Newman - VP, Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

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Lead Author of Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics
Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important, then doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already, and we should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.

Jonathan Newman - Lead Author, “Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics”

Jonathan Newman - Lead Author, “Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics”

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Lead Author of Climate Change Biology, and Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics
Vice President of Research, Wilfrid Laurier University

Climate change is certainly going to affect biodiversity. Some species will benefit from climate change, but others will not, and we'll have different ecosystems, different biotic communities as a result of this. I think the impacts that are likely are pretty clear, and I think that's a pretty good reason to do all those things we can do without completely destroying our economies and our communities because those things have moral value as well. It's not just the environment that we think is important. We also think humans are important, then doing the things we can do now, do the less painful things first. We should have done them already, and we should be now thinking about how to do the harder things.

Highlights - Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”

Highlights - Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”

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Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative

It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.

Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” - “We’re Doomed, Now What?”

Roy Scranton - Author of “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” - “We’re Doomed, Now What?”

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Author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene & We’re Doomed, Now What?
Director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative

It seems irresponsible to me to downplay the possible consequences of climate change. It seems irresponsible to assume that we're going to fix it. And so I think it's absolutely a responsibility for the people who are talking about it and thinking about it, to look at the worst-case scenario and to look at the current trajectories, absent technologies for carbon scrubbers, to look at where we're actually headed, the worst-case scenarios, and address that and bring that to each other and to our children and to our students. When you really look at the situation, it's scary and terrifying, and it upends everything that we've been told to make sense of life.

Highlights - David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany

Highlights - David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany

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Director of Globalization Studies University of Albany at SUNY
Author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (forthcoming)

I think that is often what tourism is starting to move towards. Is this existential authentic? And what that means is that you're not even really looking to meet expectations or validate that the thing in front of you is what it says it is. You are trying to recreate who you think you should be in a time that is disconnected from your usual life. Because we're a pretty jaded and suspicious society now. “Is it a deep fake?”We live in this world of make-believe and fakeness, and you want to get to something that's real. And what's more real than yourself and the story that you tell to yourself about yourself. And if you can really connect to that, you'll feel really good.

David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany - Author of “The City Authentic”

David A. Banks - Dir. of Globalization Studies - SUNY Albany - Author of “The City Authentic”

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Director of Globalization Studies University of Albany at SUNY
Author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (forthcoming)

Author of “The City Authentic”I think that is often what tourism is starting to move towards. Is this existential authentic? And what that means is that you're not even really looking to meet expectations or validate that the thing in front of you is what it says it is. You are trying to recreate who you think you should be in a time that is disconnected from your usual life. Because we're a pretty jaded and suspicious society now. “Is it a deep fake?” We live in this world of make-believe and fakeness, and you want to get to something that's real. And what's more real than yourself and the story that you tell to yourself about yourself. And if you can really connect to that, you'll feel really good.

Highlights - KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media

Highlights - KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media

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Member of Web Collective degrowth.info
Master of Environmental Studies candidate, University of Pennsylvania

Degrowth as an idea has intellectual roots in the environmental critiques of the sixties and seventies found in landmark works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which was a seminal piece of economic theory that applied the laws of thermodynamics to the economy and was very influential for ecological economics, which is intertwined with degrowth. Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.

KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media

KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media

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Member of Web Collective degrowth.info
Master of Environmental Studies candidate, University of Pennsylvania

Degrowth as an idea has intellectual roots in the environmental critiques of the sixties and seventies found in landmark works like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which was a seminal piece of economic theory that applied the laws of thermodynamics to the economy and was very influential for ecological economics, which is intertwined with degrowth. Degrowth was first formulated in 1972 by French philosopher André Gorz in a public debate where he used the term décroissance to question whether planetary stability was compatible with capitalism.

Highlights - Chris Funk - Dir., Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”

Highlights - Chris Funk - Dir., Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”

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Director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara
Author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes

The work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.

Chris Funk - Director, Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”

Chris Funk - Director, Climate Hazards Center - Author of “Drought, Flood, Fire…”

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Director of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara
Author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes

The work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.

Highlights - Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation

Highlights - Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation

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Chief of Growth at Terraformation · Silicon Valley Entrepreneur

We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.

Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation - Silicon Valley Entrepreneur

Yee Lee - Chief of Growth at Terraformation - Silicon Valley Entrepreneur

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Chief of Growth at Terraformation · Silicon Valley Entrepreneur

We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.

Highlights-Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”

Highlights-Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”

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Author of Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social & Political Imagination
Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation at University College London

The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.

Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”, Prof. UCL


Sir Geoff Mulgan, Author of “Another World is Possible”, Prof. UCL


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Author of Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social & Political Imagination
Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation at University College London

The great thing about a complex society is there is space for lots of different kinds of people. There's space for wildly visionary poets and accountants and actuaries and engineers. And they all have a slightly different outlook, but it's the combination of this huge diversity, which makes our societies work. But what we probably do need a bit more of are the bilingual people, the trilingual people who are as at ease spending a day, a week, a year designing how a criminal justice system could look in 50 years and then getting back to perhaps working in a real court or real lawyer's office.

Highlights–Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale

Highlights–Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale

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Author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale · Co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science

So these kinds of problems in what I call hybrid systems of humans and machines are a key focus of my lab right now. Margaret Traeger, who's now at Notre Dame, she did a wonderful project in which we made these groups of three humans and a humanoid robot work together to solve a problem.

We manipulated the humanity of the robot. For example, sometimes we had the robot tell stupid dad jokes, like corny jokes. Or we had the robot break the ice by saying, "You know, robots can make mistakes, too." This kind of stuff. And what we found was that the human interactions could be changed by the simple programming of the robot.

Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale

Nicholas A. Christakis, Director, Human Nature Lab, Yale

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Author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale · Co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science

We're not attempting to invent super smart AI to replace human cognition. We are inventing dumb AI to supplement human interaction. Are there simple forms of artificial intelligence, simple programming of bots, such that when they are added to groups of humans – because those humans are smart or otherwise positively inclined - that help the humans to help themselves? Can we get groups of people to work better together, for instance, to confront climate change, or to reduce racism online, or to foster innovation within firms?

Can we have simple forms of AI that are added into our midst that make us work better together? And the work we're doing in that part of my lab shows that abundantly that's the case. And we published a stream of papers showing that we can do that.

(Highlights) Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

(Highlights) Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

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Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.

Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel (Copy)

Derrick Emsley · Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel (Copy)

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Co-founder & CEO of veritree - Data-driven Restorative Platform & tentree Apparel Co.

I think what's powerful about a tree is it's tangible and it's symbolic in a lot of ways. We as humans naturally have this emotional connection, I think, to trees, and so particularly when you think of our ability to take action within the climate crisis conversation, a tree is this really powerful symbol and vehicle because it's a lot easier to understand a tree than it is to understand a pound or two of CO2 that's floating in the air. So for us, tree planting is just the start of the communication, just the start of the impact. Really if all it was was to get a stick in the ground that wouldn't have the long-term impact, whether that be carbon, whether that be socioeconomic impact, and things like that. So really for us, veritree helps us collect all that data and create the operating system to pull in the data on everything from planting forms and field updates that are coming in, survivability analysis, and different updates on things like biodiversity. We're partnering with some groups to test underwater sensors in some of these planting sites. We're collecting socioeconomic surveys and things like that to try to attach the impact to the community and back to the planting that's happening.

Frank Loy · Fmr. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs · Fmr. Chief U.S. Climate Negotiator

Frank Loy · Fmr. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs · Fmr. Chief U.S. Climate Negotiator

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Fmr. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs
Fmr. Chief U.S. Climate Negotiator

We have a number of problems, but two of them are war - we see that at the very moment - but the one that is relatively new, that we didn't have a word for it when I grew up, we certainly didn't understand when I grew up, is environmental consequences. And we have gone from not understanding that to understanding it pretty well, but having a difficult time responding appropriately to that threat.

When I decided I would spend some time in the nonprofit sector, it was my wife who said, "Don't diddle around with a whole bunch of things, focus on something that you care about, and spend both time and your money on that." And so I picked the environment because it seemed to me it had a rather unusual and unique combination of social, economic, political, technical, and scientific elements to it that made it a really interesting complex issue.

Bill Novelli · Founder, Business for Impact Program, Georgetown · Co-founder Porter Novelli

Bill Novelli · Founder, Business for Impact Program, Georgetown · Co-founder Porter Novelli

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Founder Business for Impact Program at Georgetown University
Co-founder Porter Novelli Global PR Agency · Former CEO of AARP

This is one of the biggest problems that we have in this country. So, on the one hand, we know that we have to take personal responsibility for ourselves, our own health, our families – it's up to us. As some people like to say, you're on your own. And we have to balance that against the concept that we're all in this together. You know, the idea that it takes a village and both sides essentially disrespect the other side. They criticize the other side. No, we're not in this together. It's your own responsibility, and vice versa. If we're going to be good citizens, and we're going to make progress, we have to see both sides of that equation. That's not easy to do.