Translator: Rhonda Jacobs
Reviewer: Denise RQ [Ram Dass was not able to appear
in person because of a stroke in 1997] [which prevents him from travel,
and also affects his speech] [Ram Dass] [Cultivating Our Spiritual Heart] Namaste. My name is Ram Dass. I’m sorry I can’t be with you. I guess we will communicate in this way. I’d like to speak to you
about the spiritual heart. The spiritual heart is not in time, nor is it in space. It’s just being, and it’s being present in this moment. The spiritual heart is being here now. The evolution of the spiritual heart is not a journey through time and space. It is flowering of presence. There are fully conscious beings in history who have identified with that kind of presence, like Christ, like Buddha, and Mohammad, or Krishna. They don’t appear in time. They’re always present. In our new book, called, “Be Love Now,” we use examples of Indian Saints from the last century. And they represent the human potential. They show us what our potential is as human beings. They also show the oneness of humanity, and they show the way that love brings us all together. The presence of a realized being shifts our awareness from ego
– who we think we are – to soul – to who we really are. Because the awareness in the heart, your awareness and mine, are one. My own perception of world changed in 1966, when I first met my guru in India. Before meeting him, I was Richard Alpert, a social psychologist, a psychedelic explorer. I had interviewed with him. And afterwards, I was Ram Dass. He changed my ego-centered
to soul-centered. The way he did it, first, he showed me he knew what I’m thinking, now and previously,
which blew my mind. He unconditionally loved me. And that changed me. It was not his powers that changed me, it was his love. And his love – he was love. He didn’t love me, he was love, a being of love. When I was first in India in the 60s, Maharajji said, “I’m blessing you for your book.” And I had no book. So I said,
“What book are you talking about?” And he didn’t respond. The book I then wrote, “Be Here Now,” has sold probably over a million copies. And so many people say that that book changed them from ego to soul. One blessing. It was his book. So, now I’m 80 years old, 40 years after “Be Here Now,” and we have a new book, “Be Love Now,” in which I reconsider my relation to Maharajji, and the love became central now. Reading my mind was the beginning of the ritual. After that, I said to myself, “If he’s reading my mind, he knows much more than anybody knows about me,” and I was embarrassed. And I sat in front of him, and I was sitting on the grass, and I looked down at the grass and I thought of all the things that I wouldn’t want anybody
to know about me, because if they knew those things,
they wouldn’t love me. And when I finished that list, I looked up and he was looking at me with unconditional love. Unconditional love. And I had never in my life, in my life! experienced that. One time, the second time I was in India, he motioned me over and he said,
“Do you know Gandhi?” I said, “I don’t know him,
I know of him.” And he said,
“I want you to be like Gandhi.” And I went to the bazaar and I got those little glasses,
the Gandhi glasses, but that didn’t do the trick. I just didn’t feel like Gandhi. Gandhi said, “My life is my message.” Maybe that was what Maharajji meant. My life must be my message. And all of the great saints could say, “My life is my message.” Maharajji gave me instructions: “Ram Dass, tell the truth, and love everybody.” “Everybody, Maharajji? I can’t do that.” He said, nose to nose, “Ram Dass, I want you to tell the truth, and love everybody.” Most people want to get free of their suffering, and most people want that in their heart of love. St. John of the Cross said, “I saw the river. Each soul must pass in the name of that river – the river of suffering. And I saw the boat,
which carries the soul across that river. And the name of the boat was Love. The evolution of the spiritual heart is not a journey through time and space, it is a flowering of presence. God, guru, and self are in your and my heart. They are in everybody’s heart. So then you don’t have
to go to a distant land, you can go to the guru in your heart. That’s what the human potential is:
the heart. And what these saints represent are just that. They represent our potential. I want to invite you to move your identity from ego to soul. For what each of us carries in the spiritual heart is loving awareness. Loving awareness. Awareness of everything. Loving awareness. And that’s what our spiritual heart is. Get your awareness, get your identity down to the heart, the middle of the heart space, just say, “I am loving awareness.” I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. (whispering) I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. (whispering) I am loving awareness. Namaste.
Translator: Kelly Burt
Reviewer: Laura Díaz Aguirre Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m an archaeological scientist and I study the health
and dietary histories of ancient peoples using bone biochemistry and ancient DNA. I’m here because I want
to talk to you about the Paleo Diet. It’s one of America’s fastest growing
diet fads. The main idea behind it is that the key
to longevity and optimal health is to abandon
our modern agricultural diets, which make us ill, and move far back in time
to our Palaeolithic ancestors, more than 10,000 years ago,
and eat like them. Now, I’m really interested in this idea because it purports to put
archaeology in action, to take information we know about the past and use it in the present
to help us today. Now, this idea was really started
in the 1970s with this book, “The Stone Age Diet.” It’s diversified since then
into several variants, including the Paleo Diet,
the Primal Blueprint, the New Evolution Diet, and Neanderthin, and most of the language of these diets
makes references to anthropology, nutrition science,
and evolutionary medicine. The diet does seem
primarily targeted at men, so if you look at advertisements
and descriptions, they have virile, cavemen-like images, things like “live primal,”
lots of red meat. And basically, the idea behind it
can be broken down into four parts. One is that our agricultural diets today
make us chronically ill, that they are out of sync
with our biology. And two, that we need
to abandon these agricultural diets that started
during the agricultural period, and move back in time to the Palaeolithic and eat more like our ancestors
over 10,000 years ago. Third, that we know
what these diets were like, and what they were like was they had a lot
of meat, they were mainly meat based. That was supplemented with vegetables
and fruits and some nuts and oils, but it definitely did not contain
grains or legumes or dairy. And fourth, that if we
emulate this ancient diet, it will improve our health
and make us live longer. So what I want to talk to you about today
is that this version of the Paleo Diet that’s promoted in popular books,
on TV, on self-help websites and in the overwhelming majority of press
has no basis in archaeological reality. So, thank you! (Laughter) No, I’m not going to end there;
I will explain. So what I want to do
as an archaeologist is go through this, do a bit of myth-busting of some of these
foundational archaeological concepts upon which it’s based, and then I want to talk to you
about what we really do know from the archaeological record and from scientific studies
about what Palaeolithic people did eat. So, myth one is that humans
are evolved to eat meat and that Palaeolithic peoples
consumed large quantities of meat. Humans have no known
anatomical, physiological, or genetic adaptations
to meat consumption. Quite the opposite, we have
many adaptations to plant consumption. Take, for example, vitamin C. Carnivores can make their own vitamin C,
because vitamin C is found in plants. If you don’t eat plants,
you need to make it yourself. We can’t make it, we have
to consume it from plants. We have a longer digestive tract
than carnivores. That’s because our food
needs to stay in our bodies longer, so we have more time
to digest plant matter. We need more surface area,
we need more microbes. We have generalist dentition, so we have big molars that are there
to shred fibrous plant tissue. We do not have carnassials, which are the specialised teeth
that carnivores have to shred meat, and we do actually have
some genetic mutations in some populations that are adaptive to animal consumption,
but it’s to milk, not meat, and these arose in certain populations
during agricultural periods primarily in Europe and Africa. I call this “The Meat Myth.” The idea behind it
is that we should eat all this red meat, but that’s just really not true. The meats on this plate of meat here are from fattened cattle,
these are domestic animals. Anything a Palaeolithic
person would have eaten would have probably been very lean,
probably small, and they wouldn’t really
have eaten that much meat. Of course there’s also
bone marrow and organs, these would have been very important. We see evidence of harvesting
of bone marrow in faunal assembles where you see characteristic
cutting open of the bones, like you see here, for marrow extraction. Now sure, people did eat meat, and especially in the Arctic and areas with long periods
where plants were not available, they would have eaten a lot of meat. But people that lived
in more temperate or tropical regions would have had a very large
plant portion of their diet. So where does this Meat Myth come from? There’s really two places, and one is the inherent bias
in the archaeological record. Bone is 80% mineral by weight,
it’s going to preserve better and longer over thousands of years
than delicate plant remains. But the other issue comes
from some early bone biochemistry studies that were performed
on Neanderthals and early people. This bone biochemistry study is based on something called
nitrogen stable isotope analysis. It’s complicated, but I’m going
to try and break it down. The basic idea is that you are
what you eat, and so we – there’s nitrogen-15 and nitrogen-14,
heavy and light versions of nitrogen – and we consume this nitrogen in our food. But there’s one important difference, and that is, with each step
that you go up the trophic hierarchy, the amount of the heavier
isotope increases. So if you measure
the amount of heavy isotope in the bone, you can infer where that individual
was on a food chain. This is an example
of a generalized isotopic model. I’ve plotted where plants generally fall,
and above them are the herbivores, and then above them, the carnivores. But one of the problems is that not all
ecosystems conform to this model. There’s a lot of regional variability,
so if you don’t understand the region, you can come to erroneous conclusions.
I’ll give you some examples: we can take East Africa;
if we measure animals and ancient humans, in East Africa, we see
some very strange patterns. First of all, how can a human
be higher than a lion? Lions only eat other animals. And then,
how is this herbivore above a lion? Well, it turns out
that the food that you eat is not is not the only contributor
to these isotopic values. and that aridity can also have an impact. So what we’re likely seeing here
is differences in water access. So let’s move out of the savannah
and move into the tropical areas. Let’s look at the ancient Maya;
again we see something anomalous. We see the ancient Maya
lining up with jaguars. Now, we know the ancient Maya
had a diet heavily reliant on corn. So what’s happening here? We don’t exactly know,
but we think this may have to do with the way they performed agriculture
and how they fertilised their crops. Now let’s go to the Pleistocene. We see some
really interesting patterns here too. We see reindeer plotting very low,
in the range of plants. We see wolves plotting normally
where you would see herbivores, and we see mammoths
spanning all three levels, at once plants, herbivores and carnivores. So what we think is happening here is that in very cold climates,
animals eat unusual things. and in this case
what we think is happening is these mammoths
are eating lichens and bark and that’s giving them
very strange values. So if we now go to humans, ancient humans,
Palaeolithic humans, and Neanderthals, we see that they plot in the same
isotopic space as wolves and hyenas. Now that’s true, but as I’ve shown,
if you don’t have good control over the regional isotopic ecology,
you can come to an erroneous conclusion, and I think it’s premature to say this is very strong evidence
of meat consumption, given how very little we really know
about the Palaeolithic ecosystems. So, myth two is that Palaeolithic peoples
did not eat whole grains or legumes. Now, we have stone tool evidence
from at least 30,000 years ago – that’s 20,000 years
before the invention of agriculture – of people using stone tools that look like mortars and pestles
to grind up seeds and grain. More recently
we’ve been developing techniques where we can actually measure
this thing called “dental calculus.” It’s very interesting:
it’s fossilized dental plaque. We can go in the individual mouths
of people, pull out that plaque and recover microfossils
of plants and other remains. My team is working on developing
methods to extract DNA and proteins, and other research groups
are focussing on these microfossils like starch grains, pollen and phytoliths. Now, we’re still in early days here, but even with the limited
research we have, we can say that there is an abundance
of plant remains inside the dental calculus
of Paleolithic peoples. And these things include
grains, including barley. We’re finding barley inside
Neanderthal teeth, or inside the plaque. We also have legumes and tubers. So, myth three is that Paleo Diet foods,
in the fad diet, are what our Palaeolithic ancestors ate. That’s just not true. Every single food that’s pictured
in these advertisements are all domesticated foods,
products of farming, of agriculture. They’re from the Neolithic transition. Let’s give an example – bananas. Bananas are the ultimate farmer’s food. They can’t reproduce in the wild anymore. We’ve bred out their ability
to make seeds. So every banana you’ve ever eaten is a genetic clone of every other banana,
grown from cuttings. They’re definitely a farmer’s food. If you were to eat a wild banana,
it is so full of seeds that I bet many people in this room
wouldn’t even recognize it as edible. Let’s take salads, that seems
like a really great Paleo Diet food. Except that we’ve radically changed
the ingredients to suit our needs. So, wild lettuces contain
a great deal of latex, which is indigestible
and irritates our gastrointestinal system. It’s bitter, the leaves are tough. We’ve domesticated them
to be softer, to produce bigger leaves, to remove the latex and the bitterness, remove the spines that grow on the leaves and stems of wild varieties,
make them tastier for us. The tomato that’s shown here lacks the tomatine and solanine toxins
that are present in its wild relatives, which are all members
of the poisonous nightshade family. If we look at oil, it’s true that olive
oil is the only natural vegetable oil that can be harvested
without synthetic chemicals. Except, it still requires at least
rudimentary presses to remove it, something that no Palaeolithic person
would have ever built. This is a farmer’s food. This is a model diet I found on a website. It looks like a delicious
and nutritious breakfast, but a Palaeolithic person
wouldn’t have had access to it. First of all, the blueberries
are from New England, the avocados, from Mexico,
and the eggs, from China. (Laughter) This would have
never appeared on any Palaeolithic plate. And last, we have this problem of size. Domestic blueberries
are twice the size of wild blueberries. We’ve already talked
about bananas; you look at avocados. A wild avocado has maybe
a couple millimetres of fruit on it, and the same goes for wild olives. And of course chickens, chickens
are prolific producers. They lay eggs almost every single day. They’re predictable, large and abundant. If you’re trying to collect
wild eggs, they don’t lay year round, and they’re not as easy to find,
they’re typically small. But maybe you’re not convinced, so I’m going to give
just a couple more examples. This, you may all recognise as broccoli. Broccoli did not even exist
in the Palaeolithic period. What you see on the left
is wild broccoli – looks quite different. Now, wild broccoli is also:
wild cabbage, wild cauliflower, wild kale, wild kohlrabi and wild Brussels sprouts,
they’re all the same species. The only difference is they’re
different cultivars. We’ve selectively bred the same species to produce the kind of food
that we like best. These are human inventions. Broccoli, I think, is an interesting
example because it’s this weird thing. What even is broccoli? It’s such a strange looking vegetable. (Laughter) In case you don’t know, it’s flowers,
the flower of the plant. We’ve changed this wild plant into something that produces
so many dense flowers. It produces this odd,
stalk-like thing, but it is flowers. If you don’t believe me,
buy some broccoli at your grocery store, put it in a vase, like I did
on the right, and it will bloom. It makes a lovely, lovely bouquet. (Laughter) So let’s talk about carrots next. You all recognise the carrots
on the right, but wild carrot is what’s on the left. It contains falcarindiol and other
things that are natural pesticides. They’re bitter in flavour
and they taste really bad, and we’ve bred them out
and we’ve also expanded them made them much bigger, much sweeter,
and much more full of vitamins, because that’s what we want. Many of you may not know this, but almonds and apricots are extremely closely related
species of prune. The main difference is that
we’ve bred out the cyanide in almonds, so that we can eat the seed, and we have selected for bigger,
thicker fruits in apricots, because that’s what we want
to eat from that particular species. They’re very closely related and,
like carrots and broccoli, they are essentially human inventions. So let’s talk about some real Paleo diets. First of all, I need to clarify
that there is no one Paleo diet. There are many, many Paleo diets. People, when they spread out
across the world, colonised the continents, they ate local foods, and of course
they were extremely variable. So when we speak about Palaeolithic diets, it’s very important
to speak of them in the plural. Let’s take a closer look
at one in particular; we’re going to go 7,000 years
back in time to Oaxaca, Mexico, and right now you’re looking at the view
outside of the Guilá Naquitz rock shelter, one of the earliest sites in Mexico. This is a photograph
that I took in December, and people would have
been living here at this time, and what you are essentially
seeing right now is dinner. And this is a far cry from anything
that you would find on the Paleo Diet and anything you would find
in your modern supermarket. But, there was plenty of food here
for people to eat on a seasonal basis. So, September was high time
at Guilá Naquitz. This is when a lot of people
would have come in and occupied these rock shelters, and they would have eaten
the local resources. And if you notice,
this includes a lot of fruit, legumes, agaves,
that’s what we make tequila from today. Various nuts and beans and squashes
and wild game, predominantly rabbits. But by the time April came around, there was very little
edible food in this region so they would have moved on to other
places where food was more abundant. So if we take a step back and say, “Well, what can we really learn about the Palaeolithic diets
around the world?” There are some general
observations we can make. One is that they are regionally variable. People in the Arctic have
and will eat something different than people in the tropics. They have different resources. So people who live in places
with no plants tend to eat more animals, and people who live in places
where there are plants tend to eat more plants. They’re going to be seasonally variable, because plants seed and fruit
at different times, herds migrate and fish
spawn on a seasonal cycle. As these things happen, people have to move
from resource patch to resource patch, which means that there is periodic high
mobility, sometimes over long distances. Once again, it depends on the region. Food packets were generally small; if you go around collecting wild broccoli, you’ll have to collect an awful lot of it to be the equivalent
of its domesticated variety. The foods that you would have collected would have been
generally tough, woody and fibrous. You would eat meat, but you would
also eat the marrow and the organs of the animals you collect,
and they’d generally be very lean. Finally, the plants you’d eat would still contain a lot of toxins
at various levels, and phytochemicals, some of which
actually have very good health benefits. But it’s almost impossible
for us now to eat this sort of diet. Three billion people cannot eat
like foragers on this planet, we are too big. So, can we take lessons
from these Palaeolithic diets that we still can apply
to our lives today? And the answer is, ‘yes.’ I think there’s three main
lessons we can learn: First, there’s no one correct diet,
but diversity is the key. So, depending on where you live, you can eat very different things,
but you need diversity. We lack the ability to synthesise
many nutrients that we require for life, nutrients and vitamins, and we are required
to get them from our foods. Eating a diet that’s rich in species,
has high species diversity is very important. Now unfortunately in American diets today, the trend is going
in the opposite direction. If you go and you take a processed food
off a grocery store’s shelf, it doesn’t matter if it’s cake
batter, mayonnaise or coffee creamer, increasingly there is only three species
in almost everything we eat. We have corn, soy and wheat. That’s opposite direction
we need to be going. Second, we evolved to eat fresh foods,
in season, when they are ripe. That’s when they have their highest
nutritional content. But, of course, we have to also talk
about food storage and preservatives, because in large urban societies, you can’t always eat
everything fresh; food spoils. Some foods preserve naturally well;
these include things like seeds and nuts, and that’s why traditionally they’ve been
so important to agricultural populations. But we can preserve them in other ways,
through salting, through sugar, vinegar. We can pickle them, we can smoke them, we can dry them, we can add
artificial preservatives. What I find very interesting about this
is that these all work in the same way. They work by inhibiting bacterial growth. But we have to keep in mind that our gastrointestinal systems
are also full of bacteria, good bacteria that do
many good things for you: they digest your food,
regulate your immune system, promote mucosal function. If you eat foods full of preservatives, how does that affect your microbiome,
your good bacteria within you? And the answer is, ‘We really don’t know.’ And it’s something
we’re only starting to investigate. And third, we evolved to eat
whole foods in their complete package, with their fibre
and their roughage and everything. It turns out this is really important, that your foods are not just the sum
of the calories and the vitamins. But even the parts you can’t digest
are very important. The fibre that you eat regulates the speed at which
the food travels through your gut. It modulates metabolism,
it slows down the release of sugars, it has all sorts of functions, it feeds
the good bacteria that live in your gut. And increasingly we’re seeing
that low fibre diets are associated with microbial communities that cause things
like obesity and diabetes. What’s unfortunate also in the globalised
system of processed foods is that we’re losing these connections,
we’re losing the whole food, and we’re eating reconstituted,
concentrated foods, and we don’t get the benefits
of having, for example, the fibre and pectin in the fruit juice
because it’s been filtered out. We’re losing all of this balance. And, as an example
of how this thing gets so out of balance, we can eat so many more calories, so much more food in a very small package
without realising it, and that short-circuits our abilities to know when we’re full
and when we’ve had enough. So I have a question,
and my question is, I was wondering, Does anyone here know, if you take
a soda, let’s say a 34 ounce soda, which is increasingly becoming the normal
size, like this one, and you drink it – imagine that you’re back
in the Palaeolithic period, and you want to consume
the equivalent amount of sugar. How much sugar cane,
if you stumbled upon a sugar cane field, how much would you have to eat, how many feet of sugar cane
do you think you’d have to eat? I brought some sugar cane. How many feet of sugar cane do you think
you’d have to consume to reach that level? Any ideas? One… how many sticks do you
think you’d have to eat? They’re pretty big. Not quite 40 feet. You’d have to eat 8.5 feet of sugar cane
to reach that level. That’s an awful lot of sugar. There is no physical way
that a Palaeolithic person could have possibly eaten that much
sugar cane, even if they really wanted to, and now you can consume
it in about 20 minutes. So, by decoupling the whole food
from the nutrients inside of it, we trick our bodies
and we can override the mechanisms that we’ve evolved to signal
fullness and satiation. These are the three main lessons I think
we can learn from real Palaeolithic diets: there’s no one correct diet,
but dietary diversity is key, that we need to eat
fresh foods when possible and that we need to eat whole foods. So, anthropology and evolutionary medicine
have a lot to teach us about ourselves and new technologies
are opening up new windows into the past. But we still have a lot to learn from our Palaeolithic
and our Neolithic ancestors. Thank you. (Applause)
The gardeners of the forest | Ian Redmond | TEDxSouthamptonUniversity
November 5, 2019
Translator: H Maria Castro
Reviewer: Miloš Milosavljević I’m very happy to be talking
about flourishing in the 21st century. It’s a very optimistic outlook and I think it’s a good lesson
for conservation thinking. So often in conservation people are talking about survival
of endangered species. We don’t just want them to survive, we want them to flourish. And by the time I finished, I hope you will agree that bringing them along with us on this journey to the 21st century is not an option, it’s a necessity. I had a good fortune to work with some of the most spectacular
and charismatic species. This is Titus.
Titus the mountain gorilla, who lives in the Virunga volcanoes, or lived in the Virunga volcanoes. Sadly, he died a couple of years ago, but he died of natural causes, having been one of the most successful
silver-backs ever known. You can learn about him
by looking up a documentary about his life called
‘Titus, the Gorilla King.’ Having a story about an individual is a very powerful way of getting across important information. My story began in 1976,
in this context, because in 1976,
as a newly-qualified biologist, I had a ridiculously good fortune to go and work with
the late Dr. Dian Fossey, visiting each day families of mountain gorillas, watching them and learning from them. My ability to do that was because Dian had already been there
for 10 years. The gorillas had learned to trust her. She developed methods
of winning their trust so that you’re accepted almost as a member of the family and you can sit and observe the behaviour, study what they do, study how they interact
with their environment, and how they sometimes
would interact with you. Here you see Poppy, at that time 18 months old or so, approaching Dian. Poppy’s mum and dad
were sitting yards away and they didn’t mind
because they knew Dian and they trusted her. That mutual trust is an extraordinary way to study an endangered species. The other photograph shows the other side
of Dian Fossey’s work, what made her very controversial. She felt that — to quote her — she couldn’t close her eyes or her mind to what was going on around her. And that was poaching. So we would go out each day
to find the gorillas, and sometimes we would find snares. And those snares are not set for gorillas, but set for antelope. The snares, although set for antelope, could catch gorillas. Here you see a wire one, sometimes they are made of string. But if you get that around your hand, and you’re frightened and you pull, it creates a tourniquet
and you may lose the hand or you may die. The poachers would also use weapons. In those days it was usually spears. So we would find these people in the forest, it’s a national park, they had no right to be there, we had no right to be intervening in a law-enforcement capacity, but we did. We confiscated spears and did our best to protect these amazing animals and destroy the tools and equipment of the poachers. So that was life at Karisoke
in the late ’70s. Karisoke is a research centre
that Dian Fossey founded. And the work continues through the Dian Fossey
Gorilla Fund International, based in the USA. And each day scientists still go out
to study the gorillas, but they no longer live in the forest, because of the changing
security situation there. But this is Titus’ group. Titus became this powerful patriarch, living a long life
for a silver-back gorilla, it turns out that 35 years is about
what a silver-back might live. He spent his days feeding in the forest, looking after his family. Watching gorillas feeding, you see that they prepare each food item differently. Usually scientists look
at the gorilla feeding, I want you to think for a moment, what happens to the plants after the gorilla has finished feeding? The gorilla plucks the end of plant stems and you know, if you’re a gardener, that if you prune the end, it increases lateral growth
of the side shoots, so it bushes out. A young gorilla is learning
in their mother’s lap how to do this, how to select
and prepare different food plants. So this goes on, generation after generation, and gorillas have an impact
on their forests and that’s what I wanted to focus on. They’re part of the forest. People think there’s a forest
and then you put some animals in. No. The animals and the trees and the bacteria are all part
of that forest ecosystem. One of the things
that gorillas do spectacularly well is produce manure. This is gorilla dung. You have to understand
the importance of dung. A gorilla will eat and produce something like between 10 and 20 kilos
of dung every day. That’s about a 100 kilos a week. In 10 weeks, that’s a ton of manure being spread around the forest. And in that manure are seeds. You see there two species, a tree and a blackberry. Gorillas like blackberries, but they don’t always wait
for the blackberries to ripen. Why do we want to conserve them? In my case, because I got to know
some of them as friends and they would choose
to come and sit with me. It was a case of: if someone attacked my friends, of course I want to defend them. That’s a very personal reason and why I’m still involved
in conservation. But it’s not a very good reason for wanting to protect a whole species. What about the gorillas I don’t know? Do they don’t matter? Of course they do. Dian’s reaction to this poaching was to organise anti-poaching patrols and here’s one of them, going through the alpine mole on top of Karisimbi. And these men put their lives on the line to protect a forest, which is important to them and to the surrounding community, because around that forest is the most densely populated
part of rural Africa, and all those fields depend on the water that comes out of the forest. When Dian was murdered, many people thought
that would be an end to it. But she had inspired so many people, sometimes in a positive,
sometimes in a negative way, but she made people do stuff and now the mountain gorillas are the focus of a successful tourism enterprise in both Rwanda and Uganda, and, when it’s stable enough,
in the DRC. People pay hundreds of dollars to go and sit for an hour and experience the life of gorillas
from that close proximity, no longer sitting right next to them, to protect their health, we’re trying to maintain
a 7-metre distance, so that your germs don’t infect them. But this is wonderful. And the gorilla families that are visited, whether by researchers or tourists, have more babies,
that have a better survival chance than un-habituated families. So it’s a conservation success story. It’s good for the economy of the region,
it creates jobs and the gorillas are increasing in number
in this area. But mountain gorillas
are the only kind of great ape whose numbers are known
to be increasing. Orangutans,
Western lowland gorillas, Eastern lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, all declining. So how can we use the lessons from the mountain gorilla conservation for these other apes,
when they don’t live in national parks? Many of them live
outside of national parks. So we can’t necessarily
use the same methods. And the people who share the forest
with the apes? This lady is married
to a bush meat hunter. Her well-being and the future of her child depend on his ability to kill animals. So we somehow
have to give them a better way of life if we’re going to stop them
from killing endangered species. Get them on the side. I employed them to take me out to find the gorillas without killing them. I wanted to go into elephants, because elephants are even more important as gardeners of the forest. If gorillas are gardeners
of the forest, elephants are the mega-gardeners,
because they’re so big. And the elephants that I studied
go underground. This is just extraordinary. Elephants underground. They go into deep caves to mine the rock. And they mine the rock
because it’s rich in minerals and here you see
a young tusker I called Charles, digging away in a little side chamber,
in total darkness, the flash illuminated it, and he was tolerant enough
to let me take this photograph. Just as with the gorillas. Some of the gorillas
we knew as individuals, and even as friends, were killed by poachers, because at that time in the late ’70s, their skulls and their hands
were being bought by tourists as gruesome souvenirs. So with elephants, Charles was killed by elephant poachers. For many people,
when they look at an elephant, they think that the value
of that elephant is this. This is a carving, and when people see
a carved piece of ivory they’re often so entranced
by the skill of the craftsman they forget that it was once
an elephant’s front teeth. This particular elephant
would have been a young bull, not old enough to breed, because this part
is in the face of the elephant, only that bit protrudes, and he was killed before he had a chance
to pass on his genes to the next generation. So what I want to focus on now is not the value of ivory but the value of elephants alive and living in the forest. This is the true value of elephants. Its dung. And that photograph shows you elephant dung in the forest bursting with seedlings. For an elephant, they eat about 4 percent of their body weight each day, which means that it’s something like up to 200 kilos of vegetation, which means roughly
200 kilos of droppings. Multiply that. That’s a ton of manure every week. So elephants have a huge impact and yet in the last two lifetimes, so early, middle 19th century when firearms came into Africa, that’s when elephant numbers
started to plummet. It is thought that then
there were probably about 10 million elephants in Africa. Now there are fewer than half million. So we’ve lost 95 percent
of the work force of the forest that recycles nutrients, disperses seeds and creates the forests of tomorrow. And yet these animals
are huge and powerful, we are so taken aback
by how powerful they are we think they’re indestructible. This is the silver-back who lives
in Kahusi-Biega National Park, his father, his uncle,
were killed for bush meat. And they were killed for bush meat because during the war
the rangers couldn’t help. The NGO’s like
The Born Free Foundation, The Gorilla Organisation, that helped to fund
the conservation activities, couldn’t cope because of the insecurity and also because everyone of us, in the developed world, has some kind of mobile electronic device
in our pocket and our mobile phones and laptops
need tantalum, and one of the places on Earth
where you can find tantalum is underground
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and these kids are chiselling, trying to earn money, and in the illegal mines, that are controlled by rebels, they feed the workers on bush meat. If you loose the gorillas from the forest, you don’t just loose the gorillas. We’re so taken by their similarity to us, the fact that they share
a lot of DNA with us, if you read the conservation literature that’s why we have to protect them,
because they share DNA with us, or because we want our children
to be able to go and see them when they’re growing up,
and of course that would be nice. But the real reason we need to think
about protecting not just the few habituated gorillas
but all gorillas and all elephants, wherever they live,
is because every day they are dispersing seeds and sowing the next generation of trees. Right now, we are suddenly realising that tropical forests
are not just ornamental. So, for the health of the planet, and this is the UN scheme
for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and helping biodiversity and developments into the bargain, can the dollars we attach now to carbon
help to fund conservation? But it’s not just carbon. This is an animated weather map of rainfall around the world. The white is water vapour, the orangey bits are storms and it’s speeded up, you can see the clock
in the top right-hand corner that’s wheezing round, about one day a second. Every day rains in the Congo basin, so that big pulsing
in the middle of Africa is the daily rainfall. It doesn’t just rain
in the rainforest, though. Those weather systems move West
across the Atlantic and meet the Amazon pump, which is pulsing away and sending weather
off up to North America and swiftly across the Atlantic
to Britain, and Europe. We’re all benefiting
from the ecosystem services provided by these forests in the tropics and the animals that play a keystone role in those forests need our protection because we want to continue to have this global
water distribution system acting as a sort of a biotic pump. The children in Africa, who live next door to these forests
or in those forests, have very little concept of this. So how can we educate them? One method, the Ape Alliance, which is a coalition of NGOs that I have the privilege to chair, one of our members
is the Great Ape Film Initiative and with the Gorilla Organisation
in Uganda, we’re taking pedal-powered cinemas. This is a room full of children, about a thousand kids, who have never seen
movie images before. And they are cycling to generate power to see the film, so the kids themselves generate the power and they’re learning about
the importance of apes and ecosystems, and the importance
of forest in their lives. All around the world, we want to get this message across. So it’s now possible
to visit the gorillas virtually by going to vEcotourism.org and experiencing
that amazing experience of hearing the sounds of the forest, seeing the gorillas, their behaviour, their interaction with the forest and realising, I hope, that the forest will not be the same
if we lose them. So we’re protecting gorillas, elephants, we’re trying to protect orangutans,
but we’re losing, because when we raise money for NGOs, for organisations to support the efforts
of government agencies that are trying to protect these forests, we’re thinking in terms of tens
or hundreds of thousands, bigger NGOs maybe low millions. At the same time corporations, mining corporations, agricultural corporations, are spending billions of dollars
to develop those same lands. And the Ministers
that come to our UN meetings and sign agreements to protect apes are often trumped
by the more powerful Ministries of Agriculture and Development, who want the mines to develop, or want the roads
to be put through the forest, even though opening up the forest begins a degradation
that results in extinction. So my message to the world is: bringing along
the gorillas and the elephants in our journey to the 21st century
isn’t an option. It isn’t optional, they are not ornaments, they’re not things
to go and see on holiday. Even if you don’t see them on holiday, every gorilla, every elephant, every howler monkey in Latin America
or taper are working for us, dispersing seeds for the trees of tomorrow and if we want those carbon stores and those rainwater-generating forests to continue into the next century we have to make sure that the seeds are being sown today to do that job. That’s the message. If you value the forest, protect the gardeners of the forest. Thank you. (Applause)
TEDxMonterey – Colleen Flanigan – Coral Restoration: Cultivating Mutual Symbiosis
October 17, 2019
Translator: Jenny Lam-Chowdhury
Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic Video: (Narrator) Anthropocene. A period marked by a regime change in the activity of industrial societies which began at the turn of the XIX century and which has caused global
disruptions in the Earth system on a scale unprecedented
in human history. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of the sea, land and air, resources depredation, land cover denudation, radical transformation
of the acumen, among others. These changes command
a major realignment of our consciousness
and world views, and call for different ways
to inhabit the Earth. Colleen Flanigan:
This is a human’s dining room. It’s a restoration experiment, where he left it alone
for a period of months to see if it would restore itself
to the way it was when he first bought the house.
(Laughter) Or, he hoped maybe
it would renovate itself and become what he was envisioning. But months later,
it’s pretty much the same. So for the next phase of his experiment, he’s going to build a bar,
put up some walls and clean a bit. Now, this is my dining room.
It’s one of them. It’s a large table coral
with such a valuable investment. You can see all the gorgeous coloured fish
attracted to the living space. And my visitors — I have a lot. They just rave about
how magical and functional it is. But, then a bomb blast — and someone dynamited for fish. Poseidon and I debate
about this all the time. Do we jut leave it alone
and hope the coral reef rubble will rise from the dead? Or, do we transform the destruction
and rebuild life-supporting habitat? I say rebuild — using Biorock
mineral accretion technology. To address the effects of human predatory
and parasitic symbiotic systems that float throughout the ocean unchecked, what if people hone in
on specific needs of other species and develop mutually symbiotic
relationships with other organisms, besides their pets and house plants? Do corals just need
a surface to settle upon like a shipwreck,
or maybe a million tires? No, it’s not a superficial problem. And will marine protected areas
be enough to ensure regeneration? They may keep out commercial fisheries
and other visible invasions, which is great, and important,
and necessary. Yet, many of the threats are invisible: climate change, pollution,
decreasing alkalinity and disease. Corals and their symbiotic beneficial
algae partners, the zooxanthellae, have lived in harmony for thousands,
maybe millions of years. The algae gives food and color
to the polyp animal in exchange for protection. But with warming waters
and compound stress they’ve been breaking up, and
they both suffer the consequences. The corals starve, turn [unclear]
and white, and the algae is probably eaten. It is sad. You can cry. There are some hopeful promising studies showing that corals may be adapting
to some of these increased temperatures. And I hope so. I hope they can evolve
and adapt, and quickly. But, right now, Biorock restoration
actively cultivates ecosystems. It stimulates vitality
at the cellular and skeletal level, and what better way to do this
than with electrolysis. This might be just
what the polyps and algae need. A three-way partnership that helps them
adapt to the traumatic trends. So here’s how it works — By running low volt direct current
through sea water the limestone minerals, abundant
in the ocean, deposit onto metal, and the resulting surface
is a natural substrate for corals to settle on and colonize. It becomes a non-invasive mineral rock. The electricity locally raises the PH
creating an alkaline buffer zone. This is important because with ocean
acidification and all the other factors, corals have a hard time getting
the calcium carbonate they need to build their excess skeletons. So essentially we’re giving them
free skeleton, so they can use their energy
for other vital activities, like reproduction.
They can grow faster, they can survive higher temperatures
that normally kill them. The electrolysis appears
to increase their tolerance to some environmental stress. Biorock was invented by architect,
Prof. Wolf Hilbertz, as a building material in the ’70s. It has high compression strength
and it’s self-repairing in the ocean. And he teamed up with Dr. Tom Goreau,
of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, to develop coral restoration,
sustainable fishing and permeable breakwaters. And it can be applied to oysters,
mussels and seagrasses. I want you to imagine coral polyps
invertebrate animals calcifying onto this aquatic topiary. So here is six years coral growth
in an area previously devastated by dynamite and cyanide fishing. The minerals keep building up
because the limestone is porous, and if you get really close,
if you’re there, you can see the hydrogen bubbles
fizzing up from the surface, so as long as the electricity is flowing,
the chemistry is going. There is about 60 coral arks
in Permuteran Bay in Bali, home of the largest
Biorock nursery in the world, and all of the native species
are represented. The community is very much
behind the project because it helps their eco-tourism,
supplies their fish stocks, and they love natural beauty. I got to help weld, install and plant
the structure back in 2004 at a workshop, and I just got this footage last week
from Thomas Sarkisian. He is the electrical engineer
I’m working with on a project, so I’m really very happy to be able
to share that with you, because that place looked really bad. Now, for you do-it-yourselvers
I want you to see the basic steps: design, weld, immerse, electrify — I’m hoping for
a self-contained power supply, solders homeless fragments, attach with wires and pliers, and watch it grow. (Laughter) They’re so sweet, thank you.
OK. (Applause) Now, this is another sculpture in Bali. It’s a little janky, it’s called “Zigzag”. It’s a very zigzaggy, but I wanted
to show you the progression: this is three months, two years, three and a half years. And after six years,
Liku Liku is overgrown. The sculptures can be any shape or size, from the small coral skirt
to reefs miles long. Maybe some tango dancers. If we can build a super highway, we can build a super reef. We already have artificial reefs thriving with 20 to 50 percent more biomass
than most natural reefs. I’m talking about
decommissioned oil wells, and rather than scrap them,
as most regulations require, we could apply wave or tidal energy
to prevent corrosion, and to provide an alkaline boost
to counter bounce ocean acidification caused by carbon absorption. It’s a great karmic twist. On my current living sea sculptures
inspired by DNA, and I owe great thanks to all
my Kickstarter backers, Harnisch Foundation,
Bertha Philanthropy, TED Fellowship, and a team that helped me
to make it this far. We plan to install it in the
Underwater Museum in the National Marine Park of Cancun, to distract and lure the tourists away from the over-snorkeled natural reefs, and so it can become a coral refuge
and biodiversity study. Science and policy are key
to coral health, and I invite you to add
the arts into the equation. Coral reefs are one of our planet’s
oldest natural communities, established reefs are
five to ten thousand years old, and according to scientist David Miller, humans share similar
innate immunity genes, so you’re deeply connected, and if they are in trouble,
you are in trouble. I’ve been talking a lot about
how we can help them because they truly are our life support. I imagine swimming around this table
with all sorts of species. Thankful, we were able to stimulate
mutual symbiosis in the Anthropocene. Thank you.
(Applause)
Guerrilla gardening — why people garden without boundaries: Richard Reynolds at TEDxItaewon
October 6, 2019
Translator: Rhonda Jacobs
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Good afternoon, delegates! Hello. (Applause) Are there any gardeners out there? Anyone gardening, yes? A few hands have gone up. Excellent, that’s a good start. Well, my aim today, my mission,
is to make you all gardeners and perhaps some of you
even guerrilla gardeners like me. I am a guerrilla gardener. I’m one of thousands around the world
who garden without boundaries, by which I mean
we garden someone else’s land, and we do it without asking first. So I overlook boundaries of ownership, I overlook boundaries of permission, and I certainly ignore
boundaries of convention because what we do, sadly,
still isn’t that normal. So why do people do it? That’s what I’m going
to hopefully explain to you today. This is the kind of thing we do. One little example, one small,
little patch of a roundabout just near where I live,
in the Elephant and Castle in London. And incredibly,
this nearly got me arrested. Because guerrilla gardening is still,
technically, a criminal activity. And if you want to find out more
about what happened here, you can see the video on YouTube. But I’m glad to say that getting arrested is the kind of thing that very rarely
happens to guerrilla gardeners. I’m sure I wouldn’t be here today
if that was the case. It’s just one of those technicalities. And the kind of guerrilla gardening
that I advocate, mostly, is public land that’s neglected. And to me, this is a fantastic
resource for us all. This is our land, it’s public already, and if it isn’t being looked after,
if it’s being forgotten about, or abused, or attracting antisocial behavior,
then imagine what it could be instead through the eyes of a gardener. It could be full of tulips. It could be a place of food. It could be a place of gathering. It could be a place
that’s greater for wildlife. It could be whatever you, as a gardener,
could want to make it into. Now, why did I start guerrilla gardening? Well, I live here. It’s not the most beautiful of buildings, but it is cheap, and it’s light,
and it’s airy, and it’s in central London. But when I chose
to live here eight years ago, I overlooked one
rather important criteria: it has no garden. But thankfully, just outside was this neglected, miserable flowerbed. Yes, this is meant to be a flowerbed. But the authority, the local authority,
Southwark Council, who own that building and were meant to be doing this job,
seemed to have forgotten about it. Now, some people might complain. Some people might sit back and wait
for something to be done about it. But for me, this was
an exciting opportunity. This was a space that I could
make into a garden myself. Like we heard earlier from Jason, I think childhood has quite an impact on what we later on
do in our lives, of course, and for me, London
was a foreign environment. I grew up in the countryside. I grew up gardening
as a child, as a teenager. It was my obsession, it was employment. And now here I was as an adult in London,
working in an office every day, with an itch to just
go and plant something. So my motivation
was as a frustrated gardener. It was as simple as that. I wasn’t considering this as a campaign. I wasn’t describing myself
as an environmentalist, I just wanted to do some gardening
and make this look a bit better. So that’s what I did. And this is what
it looks like more recently. (Applause) And in doing this, I was taking a risk. You know, I hadn’t asked permission. But in addition to the law, the kind of obstacle
that a guerrilla gardener might face are theft. You know, these plants
are out there in public, somebody might steal them, somebody might vandalize them,
they might trample them. People might just think
you’re a bit weird. Why are you out there doing this? Surely, it’s someone else’s job. So for me, doing this was an experiment
in seeing whether those negatives, those pessimistic reasons
why not to bother, were actually real, and as you can see from the pictures,
they weren’t too real at all. Yes, I’ve lost a few plants,
I’ve seen people picking them, but at the end of the day,
the garden has succeeded, because I think people
do generally respect plants, they have an innate power in them. And if you persevere
and make it look good, then even in the grimmest of areas
I’ve seen this succeed. But … as a campaign, as an opportunity to spread the word, which I began to get excited about, of course, just seeing a garden
doesn’t communicate that. People could see this and assume this was done by the official,
local authority. And in those early days, as I said, my motivation was just
to do some gardening. So I was sneaking out
in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to meet anyone, I didn’t want to have
that face-to-face confrontation, this was a surreptitious act. But in hindsight,
that was quite unnecessary. It was a lot of fun,
but it was not necessary, and I was missing out
on some of the other reasons why guerrilla gardening can be great,
and that’s the social side. Because if you’re out there gardening, there’s something, I believe,
that’s very approachable about being a gardener. Even though, like Sonny and Lila here
with their sharp metal tools in hand, you might think, oh, dangerous women, but no, they’re gardening, and most people can recognize
that they’re doing something that’s caring for nature. And that’s a very powerful act these days. And it means if you’re
out there in public, it’s a conversation starter. Don’t wear the high visibility jacket, the international uniform
of a maintenance contractor, unless you want to be invisible, unless, like me in the early days,
you’re feeling shy about it, then no one will ask you anything,
you can get away with anything. But if you want to have
those conversations, then gardening like this
is a great way of doing that. And it means that you might
encourage people to join in, or at the very least, it means you might encourage them
to respect what you’re doing, to tolerate what you’re doing,
to spread the word, and therefore help protect
the gardens that you’ve started, that are vulnerable
in these public places. And by being more public about it,
it’s enabled me to take on more areas. The enthusiastic gardener in me
spots these potentials all around my local neighborhood. And you can see on the map here
where I began with the blue circle and I’ve spread in the streets nearby. So places that I can get to enjoy
and I can get to regularly look after, and get help in looking after as well. Hundreds of poeple over the eight years
that I’ve been doing this here have helped me create these gardens. Now the social side has become social
digitally in recent years as well. One group that I met in Brussels who go by the name
of the Brussels Farmers, they started guerrilla
gardening as a social act. They were students,
they were leaving college, and they wanted something
that would keep them together, an activity that they could share, and they chose guerrilla
gardening as a way to do this. They also invented a day called International Sunflower
Guerrilla Gardening Day, which is on the first of May. Now this has been going
for about six years now, and we plant sunflower seeds
on May the first, across the northern hemisphere. It’s a bit late for some,
a bit early for others, but it kind of works. And this is now an activity
that thousands sign up to online, and you can see some pictures here
of people participating in Denmark, in Salt Lake City, in Poland,
in Edinburgh, even in Uruguay, which is the wrong side of the equator
to be planting sunflowers. Another way of being social
with your garden when you’re not actually there,
is to put up signs. It’s a simple piece
of friendly advertising. And here, guerrilla gardeners
in Toronto were planting marigolds, it’s very dry there in the summer, so they’re inviting people
to help out and water. I’ve seen messages all over the place,
generally asking for help or respect in a cheerful, informal kind of way so that it’s quite clear
before you’ve even read the words, that this is not an official notice, this is someone, like you,
who cares for their local space. In the last few years, guerrilla
gardening has grown and grown, and become a more social
thing than ever before. I get e-mails from people asking me,
“How do I get involved?” “Where can I find my local group?” Now, you can do it on your own, like many guerrilla gardeners do
and like I started, but there are groups now,
and just by trawling Facebook, look at all these different groups
around the world, with their own logos, their own identities, and a variety of their own missions
for why they do it as well. You can see that from the design
that goes into these identities, the degree to which they’re
more anarchic or more conventional. Now, in discovering people
around the world who are doing this, through my own website,
guerrillagardening.org, I have met some truly inspiring people, and I will give you a very brief
description of just a few of them today. This is Adam, he was a guerrilla
gardener in New York, and he was there
in the early days, in the 1970s, which is when guerrilla gardening
really began to become more mainstream. It’s really when the term was coined. And Adam has created not little patches
next to the roadsides and pavements, as I’ve done, but he
and hundreds in New York have created community gardens, social spaces where once
there was rubble and neglect. And he told me the tales
of 30 years worth of effort that enabled them to actually
get permission at the end of the day. This is Morris in Zurich,
he’s been sowing hollyhock seeds around the pavements
in the Swiss city for 25 years, and you cannot miss his work now
if you go there in the summer. And I visited Botswana
and met Nkagisang and her friends, who guerrilla garden to grow food. She found neglected land
next to her home and her garden, and took it over, planted up vegetables and has been using this
to feed a local hospital. A few years after she started,
the owner of the land discovered her, and he turned out to be a judge,
but she got away with it. He said, “Look, it’s fine. You carry on. When I want the land
for something else, I’ll let you know.” A group in Britain, in Todmorden,
called the Incredible Edibles, are motivated to grow food to make their town
sustainable within a decade. And if you go to TED’s site
and look up Pam Warhurst’s speech, it is incredible what they’ve
achieved there, using guerrilla gardening
to get things going. Now you might wonder why we don’t
ask permission in the first place. You know, there’s plenty
of success stories here. At the end of the day,
what we’re doing, presumably, it looks like it’s pretty good. And in these economic times, where the local authorities
and central government have less money than ever
before to look after things, you’d think people like us
would be embraced. Well, sort of, but not quite. The national politicians
are not comfortable with this, they’re not interested, and my local authority
are still very uncomfortable. In fact, whilst they have given me
permission in one area, they still charge us if they
were doing the gardening themselves, which is a little bit
cheeky if you ask me. The reason we don’t ask permission
comes down to trust. How can an authority
or a land owner trust someone who is not an expert gardener, they’re not coming as an organization, they’re coming as an individual,
or as a group of friends, to look after this land. And how can the gardener,
necessarily, even trust themselves to make the commitment for something that they’re not sure how much hard work
it’s going to be anyway? So for me, going out there and doing it,
gets away with that trust, because once the conversation happens,
you’ve got a track record – you’ve got a track record
to say to yourself you can do it, but you’ve got a track record
to show to the land owner that you’re committed and responsible. So I’ve given you two big reasons
why people guerrilla garden. There’s the joy of gardening
to make places more beautiful, to grow food and all the things
that growing stuff can give you. There’s the social side. But there’s a third reason
why people guerrilla garden, and that’s one for which permission
really doesn’t make sense, it really isn’t compatible,
and that’s one of protest. Pete, here, has been planting in potholes. He’s one of many guerrilla
gardeners who do this. Well, when I say many,
I know of three of them. And they vary between artistic statements, but in Pete’s case, it’s a protest
about the potholes in British roads. And I know one local authority
who were quite tickled by this and felt that it was a valid protest
and were going to act on filling these in. A protest I visited
a few weeks ago in Frankfurt, outside the European Central Bank there – it’s part of the international
Occupy movement, Occupy Frankfurt. Now, they’ve guerrilla gardened
around the parkland there with vegetables and pot plants. Now, there’s a bigger
message behind Occupy, that using gardening as part of it I think warms people
to the encampment that is there, and it demonstrates a really
hands-on action and love for the place rather than the bigger messages that
are harder to communicate to the passerby. And a gentle piece
of provocation here in Portland – not in this picture, this is a Mercedes
logo outside a dealership there, but a guerrilla gardener
who contacted me called Sandy added a little bit of hedge
to make it into a peace symbol. And she told me it lasted for two weeks
before Mercedes noticed. (Laughter) So in this case, the guerrilla gardeners
are really using plants as paintbrushes. The gardens may be very short lived, but the power of plants
to connect with people emotionally and to provoke in a way that isn’t as aggressive as some
other tools that protesters use is something that many now are embracing. I’ve done a bit of protest
guerrilla gardening myself, which combine many of the reasons
why people guerrilla garden. The situation with some villages
next to Heathrow Airport, and they were threatened with demolition
for the expansion of Heathrow, and Greenpeace contacted me
to see if we could use guerrilla gardening as a way of bringing together
the protesters from outside the community, the local residents, who wanted to demonstrate
their love for their community, and guerrilla gardening was a way of getting everyone involved
in an action together, to demonstrate the love
we all have for this place, whether our motivation
is saving the community or reducing the amount of expansion
at Heathrow Airport. And we got loads of plants donated from a designer
at the Chelsea Flower Show too. So to conclude, I have some petals – a Venn diagram that demonstrates
what those three reasons are, and I show this to underline the diversity
within the movement. And I hope that you’ve
heard something today that makes you feel “Yes! That’s the kind
of guerrilla gardening I want to do.” And in your bags are packets of seeds
that help you on your way. Thank you very much. (Applause) Host: Thank you.
Translator: Vivian Polikar
Reviewer: Son Huynh If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m going to talk about genes
and I’m going to talk about soup. I’m going to talk about the biotech food
that is coming to your table or, well… The biotech food
that is already on your table. There’s a big debate about it. Whether it’s good, whether it’s bad… What I find is that
when I go to public forums, and I do a lot of that, and I talk about GM food and biotech food, it’s surprising to know
the amount of people who don’t know anything. not only about GM food, but about the food that they buy every day
in the supermarket. You see, they come to me and they say: “Jimmy, why are you complicating my life
with all this GM food if what we have now is perfectly OK?” And the truth is that
this is not a proper question because in this question, you are assuming what you have
today is perfectly OK. What am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about the fact that
what you have today, your normal food
in the supermarket is natural, is old, is traditional and is safe. And above all, there’s plenty of food
for everyone. All you need to do is
go to the supermarket and buy more food. That’s it. Simple as that. (Laughter) I’m going to tell you a little bit, perhaps, that is going to come
as news to you. What about your normal food? What about how natural it is? Let’s talk about bananas. The banana is a very natural fruit. You giveit to your kids. There is nothing more natural
than a banana, all right? I’ll tell you what. The banana that you buy today is this one,
your current variety, all right? If you want the natural banana,
here you have it. That’s the natural banana. Anything weird about it? Anything you notice? Oh, it’s got seeds! Why would a plant want to have seeds? (Laughter) Aha. So, what is happening here? What is happening is that you don’t want to have a bite
of a banana and start spitting seeds. So, as humans, what have we done? Well, we’ve done the most
unnatural thing you can think of. We’ve given it 3 copies of the genome. Now, anyone who knows about biology knows that you normally have
2 copies of the genome, one from your mom and one from your dad. Some plants have 4 copies
or six or eight or twenty-two. But you never have
an odd number of copies. That is so unnatural
that nature is telling you: “You are not reproducing. You are not having seeds,
I’m not letting you.” Very convenient for us,
but not for the bananas. (Laughter) You can go to tomatoes, and you can see the tomato you buy
every day in the market, all right? But, you know what? You should meet the natural tomato. The natural tomato, that you still find
in South America, in the mountains, because it comes from there. That is the natural tomato. Or you can have a look at this thing. This thing that doesn’t look
very familiar, does it? But what about this? Does it look familiar? Well, this is the natural maize. This is the maize that the cultures
in Central America were eating. They were so important to them that
there was a god for it, called Centeotl. And that is the maize
that they were eating. This one, not this. But let’s put it together. This is the one I’m talking about. This is the one you buy
in the supermarket. Why is it that you have this one? You have this one
because in order to feed a family, with this, you need a lot of plants. (Laughter) But, look: I’ve got good news for you. I’ve got good news for you because now
everybody is mad about “natural.” Everything is “natural.” Your shampoo is natural, your shirts are made
of natural fibers. I googled it and I found a big company
in Australia who is selling toilet paper as “all natural toilet paper”! So, everything is natural. Everything’s got to be natural for you. To a point, it is all right. Nature is good to us. It gives us air and sunlight. Nature would give us
the food that you eat. But you know what? Nature would give us tsunamis that will kill a quarter of a million
people in one night. And you know what? There is nothing more natural
than a tsunami. There is nothing man-made about it. Ah, and nature… Nature would give us malaria. Why? Because we have this mosquito here. And the mosquito’s got to eat, all right?! So, the thing is that nature is not good and nature is not bad. Nature is neutral. For nature, everybody’s got
the same rights. Why? Because, the misconception is that
we are the only sons of Mother Nature, and we are not. You see, this mosquito
is also a son of Mother Nature, and Mother Nature is taking care of it. He’s got to suck up blood from you, and if in the meantime,
it gives you malaria, too bad for you, mate! (Laughter) So, we’ve been eating food forever. This new biotech food is going to kill us because is so new
and I just want to go with my old food. And I’ll give a bit of a tale about
the Chinese gooseberry, which was brought to New Zealand
in the 1900s. Somebody put a lot of breeding,
a lot of effort into it. Gave it a new name. And what did you get? You get the kiwi fruit in 1959. And what about the strawberries? You’re going to say:
“All right Jimmy, that’s not possible. Strawberries are very old. I know it. I’ve seen it in a movie.
Cleopatra was eating strawberries.” (Laughter) All right. Fair enough. So strawberries are actually an accident. This is an accidental cross
of two different species. Wild species, one coming from Virginia,
one coming from Chile. And you may think: “They are plants,
they expanded territories.” The Virginians were going down. The Chileans were going up. They found themselves, I don’t know,
in Central America, in the Caribbean, they have a romantic night, you know… And the new strawberries came. But, I’ll tell you what: it was romantic. It was romantic
because it happened in Paris. (Laughter) Or in the outskirts of Paris,
in Versailles, in the Botanic Garden. They had this collection, they put these 2 berries together
and accidentally crossed them. There you go, your strawberries. That actually happened
in the middle of the 18th century. So next time you go to a movie
and you see Cleopatra eating strawberries, say, “That’s not right!” So, what about your traditional food? Like potatoes in Europe,
chillies in India? You know, there can’t be
an Indian food without chillies. Curry’s no good without chili. Cassava in Africa. Guess what? They all come
from South America, all right? What about safety? This new biotech food, you know, it’s not safe because it’s new. But all the old food is totally safe. Like Cassava, which can give you paralysis
if you don’t know how to process it? What about if you try
to eat a natural banana? Well, if you try to eat
the natural banana, and actually, people do it in Cambodia, they have a big problem
with bowel obstruction, because they eat the seeds. Anyone got a coffee today? A coffee’s got a thousand chemicals. Somebody decided “I’m going
to test 27 of it.” Guess what?! 19 of them were carcinogenic. So perhaps your normal food
is not as “natural” as you thought. Perhaps it’s not as traditional
as you thought, perhaps it’s not as safe as you thought. And perhaps it’s not as old
as you thought. But at least it’s plentiful, and I’ll come back to that in a minute. Now, I need to define what is a GM plant. A lot of people don’t know
what a GM plant is. It’s a complicated definition. A GM plant is a plant to which
you have added a fragment, a little bit of DNA,
but not in just any way. You have to do it using
precision techniques called Genetic Engineering. Now, if you add a lot of DNA,
that is not GM, all right? So, it’s important to know
what is not a GM plant. If you cross 2 plants and you have
thousands of genes, that’s not GM. If you produce plants in tissue culture
and create polyploids, giving them entire genomes, that’s not GM. If you produce varieties by irradiation
or using random mutagenesis, that is not GM. And you might say: “These techniques give
thousands of mutations, unknown mutations.” And you might say: “People don’t do that.” Aha! People do. Many of the foods that you have
in the supermarkets were created by irradiation
or random mutagenesis. It was the flavor of the day
in the 60s and 70s. It’s still done. So, one of the main questions I get
when I talk to people about GM food is “Are they safe?” Well, the first conception people ask is, you know, this food
is coming from science, it is not natural… And you’ve got to agree
I look pretty mad in this picture. (Laughter) I do look like a mad scientist. The funny thing is when
I turn around and I say: “Look, this is how we do bananas. We do GM bananas, I grab them
so they don’t run away and this guy actually injects the gene.” And people go: “Wow, I didn’t know
it was that easy.” (Laughter) Well, it wasn’t that easy. It’s very complicated,
but people don’t know about it. Obviously, they always
ask me this question: “Can you guarantee me, Jimmy,
there’s no risk eating GM food?” I may be kind of a honest guy and say: “No, I cannot guarantee it.” So, their obvious conclusion is: “Then don’t make me eat it.
I don’t want to take the risk.” Is there absolutely no risk? No, there isn’t. So I got to thinking about risky things. Risky things that you do everyday
or you normally do. One of them is driving. Well I live in Kenmore,
10 kilometers from here. I drive. Driving is dangerous.
You can have an accident. If I don’t drive, it’s going to take me
3 hours to get home. Or you say, “All right, I’m not driving.
I’m just going to walk.” Because driving is too dangerous. But sooner or later,
you’re going to find a street and you’re going to have to cross it. And you stop there
and say: “What do I do?” If you don’t cross the street,
you are not getting home. (Laughter) You say: “Well, never mind,
I’m going to move.” I’m going to buy a house
on the university campus, so I don’t have to cross the street. But, you see, classes are in the morning and if you walk under the sun,
you get a fantastic skin cancer. (Laughter) You practice sports? I broke my foot doing wind surfing. You cook, you can burn yourself. You breathe, you can get the flu. But, are you going to stop breathing? (Laughter) So, the thing is, pretty much
everything you do… (Laughter) Everything you do is risky. Because when start thinking
about the things that are not risky and you think and you think
and you keep thinking… You end up concluding: “Obviously, I cannot promise you that
there is absolutely zero risk in GM food. Because there is absolutely no zero risk
in anything you do in life. What do you do? You think about it
and you decide is it worth it or not. So, I’ll tell you
about classical breeding. Not GM. Classical breeding. You got this celery variety. Very healthy celery. Mom was a celery. Dad was a celery. They crossed them. They got this variety
that was so carcinogenic that farm workers
got rashes on their skin. By the way, you don’t need
any permits to sell this. You don’t need to [test] anything. So, what about there being plenty of food? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. The news is that
in the next 2 generations, we will consume twice as much food as has been consumed
in the entire history of human kind. Depending on your belief, that’s since Adam and Eve, or since the monkeys came down
from the trees. Twice as much food. And what? You are going
to have to produce it. We are beginning to see food shortages and we are beginning to see social unrest because food prices are going up. And you know what? For you, if a kilo of tomatoes costs
$1.50 or $2.50, you don’t even know. For these guys, if a kilo of rice
costs $0.10 or $0.15, it’s the difference between
I’m eating or I’m not eating. So, for a lot of people who are not
as fortunate as us, that is a problem. So, what major crops do we have? Here is some data for you. It’s almost impossible
to find any soy beans that are not GM anymore. Or cotton. And you’d say but we don’t need cotton. Think again. Because if you go
and have some fish and chips, it’s made with cotton oil. So you’ve got maize, you’ve got canola. And if you want to talk about
the commercial impact, what is it that you have? Since GM food started in 1996, we have 1,5 billion hectares
planted of GM food. Contrary to what a lot of people say, most of the farmers who grow GM food
are small farmers, they are not huge multinationals. 90% are small farmers. Some of them from India. Some of them from Australia. And if you look
at the environmental impact, it’s incredible that essentially
GM crops have contributed to a huge gain in avoiding
environmental impact of agriculture. One example is that half a million kilo
of active ingredients has been saved by these crops. Remember, the active ingredient
is normally 1% of the total thing. And, now, the way that you [use it], is you go around your field
and you spray. And this guy has this mask, but you have to agree with me
that is not very good, all right? Some others are not so lucky. They don’t have any masks. They are breathing it. And in case you didn’t know, the incidence of cancer
and respiratory diseases in farmers is a lot higher than in people
who are not related to farm work. Why? Because they do this a lot. Now, in Australia, we don’t do it. Our fields are too big,
so we use airplanes. When we use airplanes, they’re very convenient to fumigate, but they use a lot of fuel So, another impact that you have from this is that just in 2011 alone, not in all of history, just in 2011, 23 billion kilos of CO2 was saved. [Reduction in pesticides
and CO2 emissions] And that is equivalent
to 10 million cars off the road. So, the previous speaker that you saw
was talking about 2 million. This is 10 million cars in one year. So, I hope I’ve convinced you
that GM is really the solution to all your problems, you know? Hair loss, whatever. (Laughter) The truth is: no, it isn’t. This is over-glorified. This is just one more technique,
all right? It just happens to be a technique
that is technically complicated and it’s very difficult to explain it
to your neighbors. And, therefore, whether you are
in favor or against it, you do have to respect the opinion
of the people who are afraid of them. Because people are afraid of the things
that they don’t understand. And this is not easily understandable. So, my final remarks… Look, I hope I’ve convinced you that, wherever you go, there is no such thing
as natural food any more. We do have a big problem,
and you might not realize it, but we do have a big problem. A lot of governments and countries
are really nervous about the whole thing. Mind you, we do have enough food today
to feed humanity. People are hungry
because of political problems, not because of agricultural problems. But in 50 years, that won’t be the case. GM is not the solution,
and GM is not perfect. And I would say anything you can solve
without using GM, you should. But you will be really silly not to use GM to solve problems
that cannot be solved any other way. And, of course, we need to have
a logical debate. The problem in this debate with GM food most of the time, is that it uses
a lot of theatricals. It doesn’t use science. So you can have a debate, but you have to base
this debate in science, not beliefs. Because if you tell me: “Look, GM food is not good,
because God told me so.” Well you just killed it,
because what can I say? Can I say: “Can you please give me
an email for God? Can you give me a phone number? Can I talk to your God? Can I talk to your God about,
you know, this GM thing? “No, no. God talks through me,
not through you.” And that is a bit of a problem. But that doesn’t mean that
we don’t have to respect those people, the fact that even given the science,
they decided not to have it. Because respect is number one. But, you cannot tolerate people
who will tell you: “This is this
because it’s my belief, all right?” You can say you can’t have it, but you can’t tell me
that is the reason for it. It’s like with all these cows
and all that. I respect vegetarians,
I truly respect them. It’s your belief, you do it. But don’t come to me to tell me
“I’m a vegetarian because I respect life.” Because that is not true. If you respect life,
you have to eat rocks. (Laughter) Vegetarians are the most inhuman
people in the universe, if you look at it from the point of view
of a tomato. (Laughter) Look, a goat can run away from you. A cow can kill you,
when you try to kill it. So you don’t have a steak. But a tomato… It’s just growing. He can’t run away from you. And you don’t even kill it. You eat it alive. Come on! (Laughter) So don’t give me that. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Building a big, bold, beautiful market | Eleni Gabre-Madhin | TEDxWBG
September 9, 2019
Translator: Denise RQ
Reviewer: Mary Kay What if I told you
that I had a big, bold, beautiful idea to build a commodity exchange that would transform
a billion lives in Africa? You’d probably ask,
what is a commodity exchange? How would I do it?
What would I do to reach a billion people? What would I do differently,
and what would I avoid? Well, before I tell you,
I want to show you a picture of a painting that hangs in my office
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This painting was given to me by an Ethiopian-American artist
based in New York, called Zig. And Zig told me that he decided
to make this painting when he heard about
the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange that some colleagues and I
had started in 2008 as a way to connect buyers and sellers
in a reliable, efficient, organized way. In a way, that would bring
buyers and sellers to trade together without having to know
or be related to the trading partner, guaranteed of quality,
quantity, delivery, and payment. And so what Zig saw is that 3,000 years of Ethiopian history,
of age-old farming practices where farmers had been doing
the same thing day after day, year after year,
century after century, not really getting very different results,
and living pretty bleak lives, had changed when this modern,
new commodity trading system came to be. And what he saw was that the hope
that that exchange brought was to him like big, giant,
beautiful, orange stocks of grain reaching up to fill the sky. I think you’d agree with me that this is a pretty cool picture
of a big, bold, beautiful idea. Now why was this Commodity Exchange in Ethiopia
big, bold, and beautiful? Well, first it was big because it reached in four years,
20 million farmers who’re able to use it to connect into a market
that they can now trust. It was bold because, in a country
where the telecom sector is very weak, where the mobile penetration is very low, we set out to deliver market prices to
the entire market community in real time, in less than 2 seconds, using all the technology
we could put at our disposal. And we basically set up
electronic price display boards in a 180 market towns across the country. We fed prices out on SMS
to 800,000 subscribers. For those who may not have mobiles,
who may not be able to read and write, we set up a call-in free service which ultimately had
1.2 million calls a month, largely from rural communities. We fed prices out on the website, on the TV nightly news,
on radio, print news, creating an information
explosion in Ethiopia. It was also bold because, in a country where
the national payment system for banking did not actually have
an interbank electronic fund transfer, we told our market that anybody
could sell to anyone in this country, in any corner of the country, and be guaranteed payment
the next morning. T+1 clearing and payment; the only exchange in Africa
to be able to make this promise. We, in fact, went so far,
as to tell our market that we’re going to create
a zero default market. Meaning that anybody
trading in this market, would be guaranteed quality, quantity, payment,
and delivery on time. Well, what makes this market beautiful, is that five years later, we had traded
annually, 1.4 billion a year. In total, about 5 billion dollars,
hundreds of transactions later, without a single payment
or delivery default. The impact of that was
that when farmers came to the market, armed with the knowledge
of the weight of their commodity, of the quality of their commodity,
and the knowledge of what prices were fetching
in international, national markets, even in their local market, they started to behave differently. They started to negotiate better prices,
they started to think of themselves as people that could function
with this marketing system. An that let them to produce more
and bring better quality to the market. Leading, in fact,
to a doubling of the share of farmers– share of the final export price
in the case of coffee for 15 million farmers
from 38% to nearly 70%. It led to the doubling of the export volumes of sesame
and beans going from Ethiopia. So, this is what we were
able to do in Ethiopia. But the question is
what about the rest of Africa? Is what I’ve described as the payment, and delivery,
and quality problem something unique to Ethiopia? Well, in fact, before I’ve moved back
to Ethiopia, I was a researcher, and I spent about a decade
of my life, doing research, talking to hundreds,
in fact, probably, thousands of small farmers
and traders all over Africa, discovering that these kind of problems
where markets just didn’t work was a pervasive problem
across the continent, and not only, in fact,
has it been a problem all over Africa, but it’s historically been a problem
faced by every region of the world. And if you look at a map
of commodity exchanges across the world, you would see
that every region of the world, with the exception of Africa, is served by modern
organized commodity exchanges. So I think today, now,
is Africa’s time to build those markets to serve the needs of the billion farmers
and consumers in Africa. So the question then
is: what will it take? I would build this market
for the billion Africans, making sure that we’re using
the right technology. It is not about, necessarily, taking the technology
developed for other regions, but ensuring that we have a technology that suits the market conditions
and the stage of development of our own populations. And I would therefore build
a technology in the sky, on the cloud, so that we can easily
and cheaply deploy it. I would also build this technology to link and leverage
on the mobile revolution sweeping across Africa today. So that a billion Africans
can connect to their market in the palm of their hands. Secondly, I would build it smartly. Rather than start off with this idea that we are building
one giant, big pan-African exchange which may seem daunting and unrealistic, I would build these markets
a community and a country at a time, but be able to link them up intelligently. My favorite analogy
is the Star Alliance model, which I’m sure, you’re all familiar with where 27 different airlines, all set up
to serve their individual markets and provide value addition
to their individual customer base, formed an alliance when it made sense
and where it made sense to share customers
and share routes through code sharing. I believe that an African exchange
will come about when we intelligently find
those commonalities and we link up
our coffee countries in East Africa, our cocoa countries in West Africa, our cotton countries
in Central and West Africa our cashew countries
both West, South and North Africa and even across regions, for example, we can link up
our pulses markets with pulse markets in Asia. And this is the intelligent smart build
that we have in mind. Finally, markets are not
just about technology or systems, they are about people. So the most important thing about building the right market for Africa
is to build it with people in mind. So, I want to close
by telling you the story, and before I do, maybe I should mention that the new company that we’ve launched,
is actually doing just that: we’ve embarked on four projects
in both East and West Africa, in Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania. And before I close,
I want to share with you to illustrate the point about people and the importance of building
markets for people, the story of the farmers in Humera,
Northern Ethiopia, who grow sesame. And this part oh the country,
which borders Eritrea and Sudan, has been war-torn for many, many decades. And the people in that area
are all heavily armed. This is kind of the Wild West
of our country. And up in Humera,
we went up there and told them, there’s a new way,
we’ve built the commodity exchange, we want you to bring your sesame
and trade in this market, you could bring your sesame to our warehouse
right here in a town of Humera, and we’ll give you a warehouse receipt, and then you can decide
when to sell your sesame in Addis Ababa, on the trading floor, it’s 1,100 km away, and the next morning money
will be deposited in your bank account right here in Humera. The farmers looker at us,
they said, “Yeah, right.” AK-47s. They said,
“We’ve been there before. We’ve heard every scam.
We’ve don’t get paid on time. We don’t trust anybody. Forget it.” So we went back and forth, negotiating. And we just said, just bring some part
of this cooperative that we’re talking to just bring some of your grain
to our warehouse, and you’ll see how the system works. So, they said, “OK.
But you’d better watch out!” AK-47… So they brought 200 bags
of sesame to our warehouse. It was graded, it was weighed,
issued the warehouse receipt, went itto the warehouse. They decided to trade it, they called their representative
on the trading floor, they told them what price,
they were going to sell it at. The commodity, the sesame,
got sold, just as we told them, that same day, within seconds, the price display board in that town
displayed the prices, they’re watching. Night passed, next morning, hundreds
of the farmers from that cooperative went to stand outside the door
of the one bank branch in the little town. They were ready
if there was going to be trouble. I was very, very nervous,
sitting in my office. I was hoping that this would not be day
when the system would fail somehow. Well, at exactly 11.00 a.m.
– which is the promise we’d given them, that anywhere in the country, payments are deposited
into the sellers’ accounts – they sent in the Head
of their cooperative, Atuwuldu; walked into the bank branch office. He went up to the teller and said,
“What is our balance?” The teller looked it up and told him
the money was there. Phew! He said, “Print it out.”
The teller printed it out. I will never forget Atuwuldu, standing in the doorway,
of that one bank branch, holding up that print
of what the teller had given him, the bank balance, and he said,
“The money is there!” And people starting ululating,
crying, laughing, clapping. And that day their lives changed. And that day they knew they had a market that they could trust,
that they could work with, that would change
their relationship to the market. So, that’s what is all about,
ladies and gentlemen. It’s about transforming people’s lives,
building markets, that serve people’s needs,
aspirations, and fears. Can it be done? Can we build
a market for a billion people in Africa? I believe, so. Stay tuned. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Translator: Katarina Ericson
Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner About 15 years ago, I got some cannabis
from a friend of mine. (Laughter) It blew my mind. (Laughter) It changed my life forever,
and I think it’s an idea worth sharing. So I’ve actually brought some here
to share with you today. (Laughter) First of all, are there any police
in the audience? I know you have to identify yourselves. Okay, we’re safe. Here we go. This is cannabis canvas. If you think those words sound the same,
it’s because they are. The word canvas comes directly
from the word cannabis: all canvas used to be
made out of hemp. Our Afrikaans word for shirt: hemp. The Dutch used to wear hemp. It’s got a long history,
it goes right back to about 8,000 B.C. That’s 10,000 years. It’s only been banned
for the last 100 years, so that’s less than 1%
of our known use of this plant. 15 years ago,
being entrepreneurial students, we felt how tough and strong it was
and we started making bags out of it. We started a company called Hemporium, and back then it was
the “wear what you smoke” market. There was no natural and organic market; the only people who had
a positive viewpoint towards this plant were the stoners. Luckily, we live in a country
where that is a fairly big market. (Laughter) As we grew to know the plant more though, we found out that the smoking side is actually, if anything, a drawback
to what the plant can offer because it stops people from seeing the other estimated
25,000 end uses for the plants. We learned about hemp as a fuel,
hemp as bioplastics, medicine obviously, paper, textiles, even livestock bedding
and food for humans. So, this was quite interesting,
like way bigger than we thought. We started growing that market, and then luckily, at the right time, we also learned
what was happening overseas. All these products
are coming out of countries that have recognized the mistake
made in the early 1900s when hemp was associated
with its notorious cousin marijuana. That should never have happened:
they are different plants. They are all cannabis,
but you cannot get high from hemp and you cannot get
good fibre from marijuana. Hemp is not psychoactive. The varieties you grow
do not make you high. They’re grown for fibre,
they look different in the field. It’s a four-metre high, thin plant, compared to a shorter,
bushy plant for marijuana. We learned that Australia, UK, France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, they’re all growing hemp now. They’re making products like – The top left there is a door panel
made for Mercedes-Benz using fibre grass instead of fibreglass. Protein-rich pastas. And there’s animal bedding,
there’s omega fatty acid rich oils, all your omega three, six and nine
coming from hemp instead of coming from the sea, from fish. Obviously cosmetics, and then
the latest is the building industry. Pretty soon, we had our own shops, we had a full range of clothing,
body-care products, accessories, and we were really using the clothing
to spread a message, because there’s no faster way to change
someone’s mindset towards this plant than touching and feeling. The minute you can see
that it’s got value, it changes that paradigm:
hemp is a drug, cannabis a drug, no other use for it,
it’s the devil’s weed. The minute you can touch and feel it,
you can actually change that perception. Why we did it. This is our aim. I want to be that man,
I want to be standing in that hemp field. (Laughter) This is in England, by the way,
with their crappy climate on mud island. Imagine what hemp
would do here in South Africa. We have been doing trials here
since 1998, so 13 years. It grows up to three to four metres
in four months. That is an incredible rate of growth, it’s one of the most efficient
uses of sunlight, a photosynthesis rate
faster than any other plant. It provides way more fibre
per hectare than cotton. If we had a need for fibre,
the whole picture is our need for fibre: that’s how much land we’d need for cotton;
that’s how much land we’d need for hemp. It makes 250% more fibre
compared to cotton, so, basically, we would be able to free up
all the rest of the land for food. Instead of getting our oils
from the sea, from fish, omega fatty acids can come from hemp seed. Instead of cutting down forests for paper, we can grow hemp. On the bottom right there,
that’s a trial crop in Stellenbosch. As you can see,
the birds love it … they know. We were not happy
with the rate of change here. Fibre: we’ve got cotton in this country,
we’ve got sisal, we’ve got flax, it wasn’t really picking up. We saw what happened when we went into meetings
with the government and we pulled out this, a hemp brick. We showed them this,
hemp chipboard, tree-free chipboard. Next, hemp insulation. Who’s not touched
that horrible fibreglass stuff that’s all around you
at the moment in your house? You never get it out of your skin,
it takes a lot of energy to make. This will go back to being plant food,
it’s warm, it’s a hollow fibre, it has very good insulation
properties for your house. This is the Hemp House in Noordhoek. We decided to walk our talk
a little bit more, and take it to the next level,
starting insulation, chipboard, hempstalk. That’s a hempcrete wall over there,
using lime as a binder. There’s a lot of lime in this country, 50% of that wall was grown
in three to four months. There is no other resource
can do that for us. You can’t wait twenty years
for trees to grow. We can’t carry on extractive mining
of clay and cement: you’re taking things out of the planet;
this is about renewable resources. We did it also in a modular way, a much better way
of building in South Africa because it can happen so fast and all your quality control
goes on in the factory. It can be taken to site really quickly, and this was put up
in two-and-a-half weeks. That’s inside, obviously doing
the hempcrete walls, and slowly making it into a home. That is where it is at the moment. We have hemp carpets
in there, hemp curtains, the hemp lampshades are going in, the hemp bedspreads in, and I had my hempseed nut
smoothie this morning. Here we are showing hemp
in its green glory, trying to get us
into a renewable way of building instead of an extractive way of building. The media is loving it,
they are supporting us, so we are hoping this message
is going to really go forward. And that’s us opening
the gates to the hemp field. Thank you. (Applause)
Happiness is all in your mind: Gen Kelsang Nyema at TEDxGreenville 2014
September 7, 2019
Translator: Adrienne Lin
Reviewer: Hannah Ximenes Alright, my friends. Hello. (Audience) Hello. So I want to start off
with a few questions. And I know a lot of other presenters have already asked you questions, and they’ve been kind of hard questions. But the questions I’m going to ask you are very, very simple. And I promise
you’ll be able to answer these. Alright, are you ready?
For your first one? Okay. Your first questions is — you don’t have to answer out loud: Are you having a good day? Okay, got your answer? Alright. My second question for you is: Why? If you’re having a good day, why are you having a good day? Or if you’re having a bad day, why are you having a bad day? So I have one more question for you. This should be the easiest one of all. My last question is: Tomorrow, would you rather have a good day, or would you rather have a bad day? Do you have your answer for that one? What about the day after tomorrow? What about Sunday? Let’s see. Yeah, that’s right. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sunday. How about Monday? Would you like to have
a good day or a bad day on Monday? Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? Friday? This time next week? A good day or a bad day? So that last question, like I said, is probably the easiest one for us to answer, because we know
the answer to that, don’t we? We want to have a good day, everyday. Did anyone in the room answer, “Yes, I want to have a bad day on Monday”? Of course not. We all want to have a good day everyday. So this is really speaking
to the type of happiness that we all wish for in our heart of hearts. We have a good day when we’re happy, and we want to be happy everyday. There’s never a day when we don’t want to be happy. But whether or not
we have good days or bad days really depends upon how we answered the second question. Do you remember the second question? What was the second question? “Why?” Why am I having a good day? Why am I having a bad day? So one thing that my teacher says — his name is Geshe Kelsang Gyatso — and he says that, “Much of the time our mind is like a balloon in the wind, blown here and there by external circumstances.” Do you know that feeling? He says when things are going well, when they’re going our way, we feel happy. But then if something goes wrong, for example, he says, “If we’re forced to
work with a colleague that we dislike,” but I’m sure none of you
have colleagues you dislike, right? (Laughter) He says if we’re forced to
work with someone we dislike, or if something doesn’t go our way, then our happy feeling disappears. So as long as our answer to the question “why am I having a good day?”,
or “why am I having a bad day?” Because you know,
this is a question people ask us like, maybe when you get home today, someone will go,
“So how was that TED thing?” “Did you have a good day?” And we’ll say, “Yeah, I did.” “There’s this lady,
and she talked to us about how we need to be compassionate
towards former inmates, and there’s this performer who did this
awesome beat-boxing thing with his mouth, you know, this person, and that person.” As long as our reasons for why we had a good day are
a list of external conditions, then we’re not going to have this stable happiness that we all want. Does that make sense to you? Because if that’s what our happiness
depends upon — because we cannot control people and circumstances every single day — then our happiness will
be in the hands of others, won’t it? It’ll be at the whim of our circumstances. So if you really wish to have a good day everyday, we’ve got two things we need to do. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to stop outsourcing our happiness and outsourcing our unhappiness on the people and circumstances. In other words, we need to stop attributing our happiness to what’s going on externally, and we need to stop blaming others, — especially blaming others — for our unhappiness. So for as long as we do that, as long as we’re making it the job of people and circumstances to make us happy, or as long as we’re making it their fault
when we’re unhappy, our happiness will be very unstable, and illusive. Our second job is to actively cultivate a source of peace and a source of happiness coming from inside our own mind. So here’s something I want you to
commit to memory. Are you ready? This is another line from one of my teacher’s books, where he says, “Happiness and unhappiness are states of mind; and therefore their real causes cannot be found outside the mind.” So if we have a peaceful state of mind, we will be happy regardless of people and circumstances. If our mind is unpeaceful or agitated, then even if we have
very good circumstances, we’ll find it impossible to be happy. So, in other words, it’s not what is happening that is making us happy or unhappy; it is how we are responding
to those things that determines whether
we’re happy or unhappy. It is what our state of mind is like that determines
our happiness or unhappiness. So how are we going to do this? So we can all
understand this intellectually. It’s not rocket science, is it? It’s not hard to understand. And maybe, to a certain extent, as I tell you these things, you’re like, “Yeah , I knew that already.” “I knew that already.” But how do we actually do it? How do we actually cultivate this stable peace of mind that we can rely upon, regardless of the external circumstances? So this is really where meditation
comes into play. And I would say I would need
a whole other TED talk — hint, hint — (Laughter) in order to really
do this subject of meditation justice. But for our purposes today, we can say that meditation is a mental action. It’s the mental action of concentrating on a peaceful positive state of mind. If we do that, we concentrate on a peaceful positive state of mind, then we can say we’re meditating, whether that’s like this, right? See, actually, you don’t know
if I’m meditating or not, because I could be thinking
about my grocery list. (Laughter) It’s only meditation if I’m actually focusing
on a positive peaceful state of mind. But the trick is, I can do it like this. This is called formal meditation. But we can also learn to do this
all the time in our daily life. See, here’s a perfect opportunity. (Laughter) We concentrate on a mind of patience. We’re not disturbed, not unhappy. So why don’t we try it now? Are you up for it? Just a short meditation. According to the clock,
I’ve got three minutes left, so this is going to be a very brief one. But let’s actually try it, let’s try to tap into our own potential for a peaceful positive state of mind. So now, I’ll ask you
to just sit comfortably, and place your feet flat on the floor, and your hands within your lap. And then you can lightly close your eyes and become aware of
the sensation of your breath, at the tip of your nose. And as you breathe out, you can imagine you’re breathing out any agitation, any mental busyness, any frustration or unhappiness in your life. Breathing it all out, like dark smoke. And as you breathe in, you can imagine and believe that you’re breathing in
a clear, bright light, which is a very nature of inner peace. And you can imagine that
this clear, bright light fills your entire body and mind. And for a few seconds, simply enjoy this inner peace coming from within. And now, as we finish, just be determined to
bring this inner peace with you into the rest of your day to benefit yourself and others. So now, we rise from meditation. Thank you very much. (Applause)