Nature is everywhere -- we just need to learn to see it | Emma Marris

159,919 views ・ 2016-08-19

TED


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00:12
We are stealing nature from our children.
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Now, when I say this, I don't mean that we are destroying nature
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that they will have wanted us to preserve,
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although that is unfortunately also the case.
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What I mean here is that we've started to define nature in a way
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that's so purist and so strict
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that under the definition we're creating for ourselves,
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there won't be any nature left for our children
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when they're adults.
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But there's a fix for this.
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So let me explain.
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Right now, humans use half of the world
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to live, to grow their crops and their timber,
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to pasture their animals.
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If you added up all the human beings,
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we would weigh 10 times as much as all the wild mammals put together.
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We cut roads through the forest.
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We have added little plastic particles to the sand on ocean beaches.
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We've changed the chemistry of the soil with our artificial fertilizers.
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And of course, we've changed the chemistry of the air.
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So when you take your next breath,
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you'll be breathing in 42 percent more carbon dioxide
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than if you were breathing in 1750.
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So all of these changes, and many others,
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have come to be kind of lumped together under this rubric of the "Anthropocene."
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And this is a term that some geologists are suggesting
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we should give to our current epoch,
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given how pervasive human influence has been over it.
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Now, it's still just a proposed epoch, but I think it's a helpful way
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to think about the magnitude of human influence on the planet.
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So where does this put nature?
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What counts as nature in a world where everything is influenced by humans?
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So 25 years ago, environmental writer Bill McKibben said
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that because nature was a thing apart from man
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and because climate change meant
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that every centimeter of the Earth was altered by man,
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then nature was over.
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In fact, he called his book "The End of Nature."
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I disagree with this. I just disagree with this.
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I disagree with this definition of nature, because, fundamentally, we are animals.
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Right? Like, we evolved on this planet
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in the context of all the other animals with which we share a planet,
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and all the other plants, and all the other microbes.
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And so I think that nature
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is not that which is untouched by humanity, man or woman.
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I think that nature is anywhere where life thrives,
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anywhere where there are multiple species together,
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anywhere that's green and blue and thriving and filled with life
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and growing.
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And under that definition,
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things look a little bit different.
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Now, I understand that there are certain parts of this nature
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that speak to us in a special way.
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Places like Yellowstone,
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or the Mongolian steppe,
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or the Great Barrier Reef
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or the Serengeti.
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Places that we think of as kind of Edenic representations
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of a nature before we screwed everything up.
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And in a way, they are less impacted by our day to day activities.
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Many of these places have no roads or few roads,
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so on, like such.
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But ultimately, even these Edens are deeply influenced by humans.
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Now, let's just take North America, for example,
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since that's where we're meeting.
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So between about 15,000 years ago when people first came here,
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they started a process of interacting with the nature
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that led to the extinction of a big slew of large-bodied animals,
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from the mastodon to the giant ground sloth,
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saber-toothed cats,
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all of these cool animals that unfortunately are no longer with us.
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And when those animals went extinct,
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you know, the ecosystems didn't stand still.
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Massive ripple effects changed grasslands into forests,
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changed the composition of forest from one tree to another.
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So even in these Edens,
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even in these perfect-looking places
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that seem to remind us of a past before humans,
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we're essentially looking at a humanized landscape.
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Not just these prehistoric humans, but historical humans, indigenous people
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all the way up until the moment when the first colonizers showed up.
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And the case is the same for the other continents as well.
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Humans have just been involved in nature
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in a very influential way for a very long time.
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Now, just recently, someone told me,
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"Oh, but there are still wild places."
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And I said, "Where? Where? I want to go."
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And he said, "The Amazon."
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And I was like, "Oh, the Amazon. I was just there.
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It's awesome. National Geographic sent me to Manú National Park,
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which is in the Peruvian Amazon,
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but it's a big chunk of rainforest, uncleared, no roads,
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protected as a national park,
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one of the most, in fact, biodiverse parks in the world.
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And when I got in there with my canoe, what did I find, but people.
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People have been living there for hundreds and thousands of years.
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People live there, and they don't just float over the jungle.
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They have a meaningful relationship with the landscape.
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They hunt. They grow crops.
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They domesticate crops.
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They use the natural resources to build their houses,
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to thatch their houses.
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They even make pets out of animals that we consider to be wild animals.
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These people are there
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and they're interacting with the environment
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in a way that's really meaningful and that you can see in the environment.
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Now, I was with an anthropologist on this trip,
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and he told me, as we were floating down the river,
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he said, "There are no demographic voids in the Amazon."
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This statement has really stuck with me,
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because what it means is that the whole Amazon is like this.
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There's people everywhere.
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And many other tropical forests are the same,
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and not just tropical forests.
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People have influenced ecosystems in the past,
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and they continue to influence them in the present,
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even in places where they're harder to notice.
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So, if all of the definitions of nature that we might want to use
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that involve it being untouched by humanity
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or not having people in it,
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if all of those actually give us a result where we don't have any nature,
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then maybe they're the wrong definitions.
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Maybe we should define it by the presence of multiple species,
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by the presence of a thriving life.
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Now, if we do it that way,
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what do we get?
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Well, it's this kind of miracle.
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All of a sudden, there's nature all around us.
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All of a sudden, we see this Monarch caterpillar
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munching on this plant,
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and we realize that there it is,
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and it's in this empty lot in Chattanooga.
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And look at this empty lot.
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I mean, there's, like, probably,
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a dozen, minimum, plant species growing there,
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supporting all kinds of insect life,
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and this is a completely unmanaged space, a completely wild space.
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This is a kind of wild nature right under our nose,
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that we don't even notice.
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And there's an interesting little paradox, too.
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So this nature,
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this kind of wild, untended part
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of our urban, peri-urban, suburban agricultural existence
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that flies under the radar,
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it's arguably more wild than a national park,
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because national parks are very carefully managed
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in the 21st century.
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Crater Lake in southern Oregon, which is my closest national park,
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is a beautiful example of a landscape that seems to be coming out of the past.
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But they're managing it carefully.
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One of the issues they have now is white bark pine die-off.
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White bark pine is a beautiful, charismatic --
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I'll say it's a charismatic megaflora
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that grows up at high altitude --
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and it's got all these problems right now with disease.
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There's a blister rust that was introduced,
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bark beetle.
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So to deal with this, the park service has been planting
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rust-resistant white bark pine seedlings in the park,
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even in areas that they are otherwise managing as wilderness.
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And they're also putting out beetle repellent in key areas
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as I saw last time I went hiking there.
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And this kind of thing is really much more common than you would think.
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National parks are heavily managed.
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The wildlife is kept to a certain population size and structure.
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Fires are suppressed.
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Fires are started.
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Non-native species are removed.
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Native species are reintroduced.
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And in fact, I took a look,
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and Banff National Park is doing all of the things I just listed:
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suppressing fire, having fire,
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radio-collaring wolves, reintroducing bison.
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It takes a lot of work to make these places look untouched.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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And in a further irony, these places that we love the most
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are the places that we love a little too hard, sometimes.
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A lot of us like to go there,
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and because we're managing them to be stable
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in the face of a changing planet,
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they often are becoming more fragile over time.
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Which means that they're the absolute worst places
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to take your children on vacation,
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because you can't do anything there.
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You can't climb the trees.
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You can't fish the fish.
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You can't make a campfire out in the middle of nowhere.
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You can't take home the pinecones.
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There are so many rules and restrictions
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that from a child's point of view,
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this is, like, the worst nature ever.
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Because children don't want to hike
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through a beautiful landscape for five hours
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and then look at a beautiful view.
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That's maybe what we want to do as adults,
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but what kids want to do is hunker down in one spot
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and just tinker with it, just work with it,
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just pick it up, build a house, build a fort, do something like that.
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Additionally, these sort of Edenic places
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are often distant from where people live.
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And they're expensive to get to. They're hard to visit.
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So this means that they're only available to the elites,
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and that's a real problem.
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The Nature Conservancy did a survey of young people,
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and they asked them, how often do you spend time outdoors?
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And only two out of five spent time outdoors
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at least once a week.
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The other three out of five were just staying inside.
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And when they asked them why, what are the barriers to going outside,
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the response of 61 percent was,
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"There are no natural areas near my home."
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And this is crazy. This is just patently false.
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I mean, 71 percent of people in the US
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live within a 10-minute walk of a city park.
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And I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries.
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And that doesn't even count your back garden,
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the urban creek, the empty lot.
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Everybody lives near nature.
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Every kid lives near nature.
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We've just somehow forgotten how to see it.
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We've spent too much time watching David Attenborough documentaries
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where the nature is really sexy --
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(Laughter)
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and we've forgotten how to see the nature that is literally right outside our door,
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the nature of the street tree.
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So here's an example: Philadelphia.
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There's this cool elevated railway
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that you can see from the ground, that's been abandoned.
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Now, this may sound like the beginning of the High Line story in Manhattan,
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and it's very similar, except they haven't developed this into a park yet,
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although they're working on it.
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So for now, it's still this little sort of secret wilderness
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in the heart of Philadelphia,
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and if you know where the hole is in the chain-link fence,
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you can scramble up to the top
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and you can find this completely wild meadow
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just floating above the city of Philadelphia.
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Every single one of these plants grew from a seed
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that planted itself there.
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This is completely autonomous, self-willed nature.
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And it's right in the middle of the city.
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And they've sent people up there to do sort of biosurveys,
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and there are over 50 plant species up there.
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And it's not just plants.
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This is an ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem.
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It's creating soil. It's sequestering carbon.
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There's pollination going on.
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I mean, this is really an ecosystem.
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So scientists have started calling ecosystems like these "novel ecosystems,"
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because they're often dominated by non-native species,
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and because they're just super weird.
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They're just unlike anything we've ever seen before.
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For so long, we dismissed all these novel ecosystems as trash.
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We're talking about regrown agricultural fields,
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timber plantations that are not being managed on a day-to-day basis,
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second-growth forests generally, the entire East Coast,
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where after agriculture moved west, the forest sprung up.
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And of course, pretty much all of Hawaii,
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where novel ecosystems are the norm,
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where exotic species totally dominate.
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This forest here has Queensland maple,
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it has sword ferns from Southeast Asia.
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You can make your own novel ecosystem, too.
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It's really simple.
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You just stop mowing your lawn.
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(Laughter)
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Ilkka Hanski was an ecologist in Finland, and he did this experiment himself.
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He just stopped mowing his lawn,
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and after a few years, he had some grad students come,
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and they did sort of a bio-blitz of his backyard,
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and they found 375 plant species,
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including two endangered species.
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So when you're up there on that future High Line of Philadelphia,
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surrounded by this wildness,
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surrounded by this diversity, this abundance, this vibrance,
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you can look over the side
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and you can see a local playground for a local school,
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and that's what it looks like.
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These children have, that --
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You know, under my definition,
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there's a lot of the planet that counts as nature,
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but this would be one of the few places that wouldn't count as nature.
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There's nothing there except humans, no other plants, no other animals.
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And what I really wanted to do
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was just, like, throw a ladder over the side
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and get all these kids to come up with me into this cool meadow.
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In a way, I feel like this is the choice that faces us.
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If we dismiss these new natures as not acceptable or trashy or no good,
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we might as well just pave them over.
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And in a world where everything is changing,
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we need to be very careful about how we define nature.
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In order not to steal it from our children,
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we have to do two things.
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First, we cannot define nature as that which is untouched.
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This never made any sense anyway.
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Nature has not been untouched for thousands of years.
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And it excludes most of the nature that most people can visit
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and have a relationship with,
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including only nature that children cannot touch.
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Which brings me to the second thing that we have to do,
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which is that we have to let children touch nature,
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because that which is untouched is unloved.
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(Applause)
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We face some pretty grim environmental challenges on this planet.
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Climate change is among them.
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There's others too: habitat loss is my favorite thing
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to freak out about in the middle of the night.
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But in order to solve them,
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we need people -- smart, dedicated people --
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who care about nature.
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And the only way we're going to raise up a generation of people
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who care about nature
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is by letting them touch nature.
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I have a Fort Theory of Ecology,
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Fort Theory of Conservation.
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Every ecologist I know, every conservation biologist I know,
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every conservation professional I know,
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built forts when they were kids.
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If we have a generation that doesn't know how to build a fort,
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we'll have a generation that doesn't know how to care about nature.
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And I don't want to be the one to tell this kid,
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who is on a special program
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that takes Philadelphia kids from poor neighborhoods
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and takes them to city parks,
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I don't want to be the one to tell him that the flower he's holding
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is a non-native invasive weed that he should throw away as trash.
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I think I would much rather learn from this boy
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that no matter where this plant comes from,
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it is beautiful, and it deserves to be touched and appreciated.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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