What Does It Take to Create Change? An Artist and a Conservationist Answer | TED Intersections

Amir Nizar Zuabi: The animals leave

because they are early warning signs of a systematic collapse,

and walk through our cities to remind us,

to remind us of beauty.

I think beauty is a big word, an important word.

They remind us of what happens when we work together --

and that we can achieve impossible things, even ridiculously impossible things.

But you know a lot about ridiculously impossible.

[Intersections]

[Kristine McDivitt Tompkins: President, Tompkins Conservation]

[Amir Nizar Zuabi: Theater writer, director]

ANZ: Amal, which is my first project, was a refugee child that traveled.

She was a puppet, but she was a refugee child.

One of the most beautiful moments from my point of view was

recently on the border of Mexico and the United States.

There was a big line of immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees.

I don't want to get into the political titles,

but people that are leaving a country in order to find a better life.

They were standing in the sun in the Sonoran desert,

and Amal arrived out of nowhere because we were walking.

And there was a beautiful moment where the border police,

the American border police,

and the children of the immigrants and the immigrants themselves

all had the same look on their face.

And the look was full of love.

And I think that moment,

suddenly they all became one thing for a brief second.

It only lasted a second, but.

KMT: I wouldn't have actually understood that,

except I've seen Amal

and this really had a tremendous impact on me

because you're taking all the feelings and expressions

that we have standing on the ground,

and we all know what they are.

But then you elevate this.

Even though she's a puppet,

she transcends everything,

really the only languages we have on the ground,

and transcends that

and walks straight over the top of how we behave day to day.

ANZ: That moment was a huge moment of optimism for me.

KMT: Yeah, well, I can see that.

Will you talk a little bit about "The Herd?"

Do you mind?

ANZ: "The Herds."

KMT: "Herds?"

(Laughter)

ANZ: We're creating a big migration of life-sized puppet animals

made from recycled materials, mainly cardboard.

And we're going to start in central Africa,

in the Congo Basin,

which is in many ways the cradle of civilization.

And we're going to journey from Congo, from Kinshasa,

all the way to Tromsø in the north of Norway,

in a long, long,

slow journey of migration.

The animals are leaving because the world is becoming too hot.

So they're going to ...

The animals leave because they are early warning signs

of a systematic collapse.

And the animals leave

and walk through our cities to remind us,

to temind us of beauty.

I think beauty is a big word, an important word.

They remind us of what happens when we work together.

Because this project is obviously about a huge network

of collaborations between people.

And that we can achieve impossible things, even ridiculously impossible things.

But you know a lot about ridiculously impossible, right?

So that's the idea behind "The Herds."

And we're starting in the spring of '25,

so it's quite close.

Yeah, come and walk with me.

KMT: I'm going to.

ANZ: With lots of puppet animals.

KMT: No, I'm going to.

I'm going to take one of the gazelles.

I want to walk, I want to do the stint

where they get far enough into the Sahara

that they can't go any farther,

and then they appear on the northern side.

ANZ: I can't wait.

KMT: And my thumb is out, I'm going to hitchhike on.

ANZ: Hitchhiking on a paper camel.

KMT: That's right.

ANZ: Amal was very, very powerful,

not just because she was beautiful and very big.

I think the pure genius of the people who created Amal,

Handspring Puppet Company,

was to create a perfect storm

of vulnerability and fierceness.

She's completely vulnerable as a structure.

She's a stilt walker hanging above and can collapse at any second.

And that's visible.

People see that she's not stable.

But she's also huge and fierce.

Which leads me to my next question to you, in a way.

Because you are in many ways a mixture

of vulnerability and fierceness, right?

I think you took your personal pain

and flipped it into this huge power to change things.

And I think that opens up so many interesting points for me

in questions I want to ask you of how do you do that?

How do you take loss and pain and grief

and turn it into this all-consuming,

positive power to change the world?

Because you are changing the world.

KMT: You know, I grew up in a family where our father was super clear.

All of his kids,

he didn't care what we did, but make sure you're great at it.

So I had that kind of firepower

drilled into me when I was little.

And then Patagonia,

Yvon Chouinard wanted to start making clothes,

he just said, "Oh, here,

invent this company."

So I like starting things at zero.

I like things that are difficult.

I like -- I don’t know if that’s a personality trait or something.

But the work that Tompkins Conservation does today

is essentially supporting our legacy groups

rewilding Chile and that country,

and rewilding Argentina.

And expanding the work we’ve done for the last 30 years

out into the rest of the continent

in terms of rewilding and land and sea conservation.

Doug and I worked in all these projects for 25 years.

And then when he died, suddenly,

it's no secret, I just wanted to go with him.

Not kill myself,

but just walk into the same lake

and vanish.

And yet we have all of these people,

these team members.

They're like family,

you have been through wars with them.

You have ...

You’re living in these very isolated places,

and you're building schools

so the kids of the team members can go to school locally.

And, you know, you're creating these villages

and the power of a village, as I'm sure you know,

is, I think perhaps one of the great strengths of human bonding.

And so I finally thought, what am I doing?

I have to turn this into something else.

And then it was just like that.

Just get up and ...

You just don't stop, I don't know.

I think there are elements of our character and personality

that only when they're at their --

that your skin is so burned

that you are in communication with a part of yourself

that is almost never called upon.

But you have it.

And in many ways, you're on autopilot at first.

You just start doing,

and pretty soon the doing becomes a form in itself.

And the loss, it doesn't retract itself,

but somehow it starts to add in to the doing.

And so that, you know,

grief is like learning to speak a second, third, fourth language.

And eventually acting on things that you believe in

and you're relentless about.

That begins to take the same power

that this grief had at one point.

Something like that.

ANZ: How do you deal with “no”?

KMT: Not well.

(Laughter)

ANZ: I'm sure in creating these huge parks,

there were many no's.

There’s many walls to bash your head against,

and they don't always crack.

KMT: You know, we haven't had so many no's.

We've worked with 12 different presidents,

and I think we've created a national park with every one of them.

But we have had, you know, very difficult times

when people thought we were ...

creating new Jewish states,

even though we were raised as Anglicans.

Or a new military base for Argentina.

Or a nuclear waste dump for the United States.

So we had years when it was quite dangerous

and a lot of death threats

Phones were tapped for years and years and things like that.

But I think you just keep your shoulder to the ground

and keep doing exactly what you said you're doing.

And eventually, eventually,

people began to understand

that maybe what they've been talking about

is what they're actually doing.

And you have to earn people's trust.

You have to ...

I think that's the ...

That's a huge part of the job,

is showing up and doing exactly what you say you're going to do,

and you do it year after year after year after year.

And pretty soon you're starting to change culture.

You're starting to change

how society looks at their own jewels of their country.

And it goes something like that.

ANZ: Are you an optimist?

Now, after, you know.

KMT: I’m not an optimist for this century.

Because I think what’s already begun

is, in terms of climate impacts,

the great extinction crisis.

I get asked this a lot,

and it's usually couched in a, "Do you think climate,

the fear of climate chaos is real?"

And I’m so in shock by that question,

because if people really understand

that hundreds of millions of people today

are affected by the change in their climate,

whether it's drought, it's monsoon,

it's all these swinging extremes going back and forth.

And if you’re on an island in the southern Pacific

or if you're in the Sudan, the South Sudan, northern Kenya,

these things are happening.

And it's very hard to slow this train down.

And so in the short term,

I'm very concerned.

As David Attenborough says,

the vast majority of people who are influenced

and affected by climate change

are the very people who have no say in it,

and they're the very people who can't get out of the way.

And so, yeah, I already have this sense

of tremendous pain

that these things are underway.

And I think this is going to be a very difficult next 50 years, 80 years.

And I think somehow I'm more optimistic about the next century

because we will have gone through this calamity

as a world people.

And I hope that humans finally figure out

that they have no choice.

They have to live within the confines and boundaries of natural systems.

That's how I see it.

ANZ: I'm actually very hopeful.

I know this, coming from, I’m an “opsimist.”

I'm an optimistic pessimist.

Obviously, coming from where I come,

there's no reason to be optimistic.

But I do believe in mankind.

I think we will come to our senses.

We usually do it too late, a bit too late.

But somehow we do it on the brink.

And we pay a price.

And I think we are paying a price.

It's not theoretical.

Walking with Amal through Europe,

you see people that have left because of climate change.

This is not theoretical.

And it will also, and I think that's part of the reason why I'm,

I don't know if optimistic is the right word.

But we don't know what the effects are.

There is a bit of, "We're protected,

it will happen to the global South."

Which is not necessarily true.

It's happening now in the global South because these are weaker communities.

The infrastructure is weaker,

there's not enough fat on the body.

KMT: That's right.

ANZ: But you know, who knows?

Who knows how it will hit.

KMT: I agree with you.

You know, I study economics

and petroleum futures

and all kind of strange things,

trying to understand, like, at what point are we going to really ...

Understand the real impacts of things.

And you know what black swans are?

They are these unanticipated consequences that have ...

there's no warning.

Like, for instance,

if you look at the fall of the Berlin Wall,

and if you take yourself to mid-September, 1989,

nobody thought the Berlin Wall would come down.

And early October, it's finished.

And so these black swans exist,

they are unanticipated consequences.

So I agree with you.

We can't know today how this is all going to unfold.

And therefore, I think you and I work on things,

regardless of how we see the immediate,

mid-range and long-term outcomes.

It's not going to change what you do when you get up at night,

because you don't actually know how it's going to unfold.

ANZ: But, but, but --

And I think that's true to war and nature.

The minute it's over, life starts in all its vivacity and all its beauty,

you know, you see a fire, and a second later

the forest starts again, kicks in again.

In the midst of the terrible devastation that's happening in my homeland,

there's children playing.

And even in the rubble,

I saw a beautiful video of children sliding down a slab of concrete

of a demolished house.

And the laughter and the joy was incredible.

Inside all this misery,

I think life is very powerful,

and that's what keeps me optimistic in these very, very frightening times.

And I'm not talking only about my homeland.

I'm talking about our faith as mankind, as humankind.

KMT: What keeps you awake at night?

What are you thinking about?

ANZ: A lot of things keep me awake at night.

I come from Palestine, so the year was especially tormenting.

I've lost friends.

The situation back home is very, very dire.

That keeps me awake at night.

But I think ...

I think that...

Our lack of compassion is what drives me,

and in many ways, drove me to become a theater practitioner

when I was a young kid in Palestine.

And I chose the tool I know best,

which is storytelling, to create compassion.

And I think there's a lot of connection

between the lack of compassion to our fellow man,

but also to our climate, to our environment, to our spaces,

to the other creatures that live with us on this ever-rotating planet.

And I think they're very connected,

all these issues are connected for me.

I can't separate

the violence that has ensued now in my home

from the violence that has ensued on climate.

And of course, they’re all so connected because ...

The engine is very similar.

KMT: Yeah, I completely agree.

I think that the devastation of human communities

through war or all sorts of ...

Injustice and inequity is exactly the same phenomenon

that's happening with the non-human world as well.

There are so few people who really pull the levers

and run kind of the globalized economy and so on and so forth.

But if we believe that all life has intrinsic value,

which I think we do believe that, then ...

It's very painful, as you say, in human societies,

and it's extremely painful in the non-human world

as these species blink out.

And some of them millions and millions of years on this planet,

and in the blink of an eye,

in geologic time, they're gone.

And of course, if you pull way back, species are rising and falling.

But I have a lot of trouble staying ...

Quite so understanding when we know what's taking place

in the human and non-human world.

And the number of decisions within boardrooms around the world

don't reflect

the price that life is having to pay for this lifestyle,

who very few enjoy.

ANZ: What is the solution?

KMT: Good question.

ANZ: Or is it a mix of solutions?

KMT: Yeah, I think it's always a mix of solutions.

I study collapse of civilization, human civilizations,

as a hobby, not as my life's work.

And I think ...

I think we really change under crisis.

I think humans tend to not do what's absolutely necessary

until they have no choice but to act.

And I'm talking about people who really have an impact,

whether it's on the economic side, really any area.

And I think that we're not there yet,

but I think that we'll be forced to change the way that we're behaving.

And I think it will be swift, as these things often are.

And I'm ...

That's just what I think,

I think we won't change until we're forced to.

ANZ: I agree completely,

and I think that both on the political level,

I think that all my work, from my point of view, is prepping --

KMT: Right.

ANZ: Is prepping us, prepping myself,

my immediate community, my audience

that is preparing us to change,

is preparing us to the expansion of the heart

that has to come when change happens.

KMT: Amir, thank you for talking to me.

ANZ: Kris, thank you very much.

You're a true inspiration.

I'm saying this with lots of friendship and love

to what you do and who you are.

And I'm grateful.

KMT: I feel the same way.

This is the first of what will be 1,000 conversations.

ANZ: Inshallah.

KMT: Inshallah.