The route to a sustainable future

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When I'm starting talks like this,
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I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability
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because a lot of people out there don't know what that is.
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This is a crowd that does know what it is,
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so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right?
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So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know?
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Fill in the blanks.
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So, you know, sustainability, small planet.
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Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun.
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You know, about a million years ago,
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a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees,
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got a little clever, harnessed fire,
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invented the printing press,
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made, you know, luggage with wheels on it.
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And, you know, built the society that we now live in.
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Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt,
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the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created,
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it's got some major, major flaws.
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One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint.
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It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable.
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How much stuff goes through your life,
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how much waste is left behind you.
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And we, at the moment, in our society,
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have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this.
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We're using up about five planets.
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If everybody on the planet lived the way we did,
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we'd need between five, six, seven,
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some people even say 10 planets to make it.
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Clearly we don't have 10 planets.
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Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet,
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10 planets, one planet. Right?
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We don't have that. So that's one problem.
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The second problem is that the planet that we have
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is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right?
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North Americans, such as myself, you know,
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we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs,
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and we're eating all sorts of stuff.
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And, you know, then you get all the way down
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to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa.
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And people simply do not have enough to survive.
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This is producing all sorts of tensions,
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all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing.
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And there's more and more people on the way. Right?
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So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years.
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It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people.
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So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet.
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A third of the people on this planet are kids.
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And those kids are growing up in a completely different way
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than their parents did, no matter where they live.
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They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity.
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And they may not want to live exactly like us.
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They may not want to be Americans, or Brits,
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or Germans, or South Africans,
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but they want their own version
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of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic,
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and more, you know, enjoyable.
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And all of these things combine to create
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an enormous amount of torque on the planet.
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And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque,
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we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly
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facing situations which are simply unthinkable.
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Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios.
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I don't need to go into that.
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But I will ask the question, what's the alternative?
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And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable.
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You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable;
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on the other hand we have the unimaginable.
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We don't know yet how to build a society
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which is environmentally sustainable,
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which is shareable with everybody on the planet,
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which promotes stability and democracy and human rights,
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and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary
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to make it through the challenges we face.
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We don't know how to do this yet.
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So what's Worldchanging?
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Well, Worldchanging you might think of
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as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future.
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You know, what we're out there doing is looking
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for examples of tools, models and ideas,
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which, if widely adopted, would change the game.
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A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things
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that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of,
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but most people haven't.
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So I thought today I'd do something a little different,
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and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know,
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rather than giving you tried-and-true examples.
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Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out.
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Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook.
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And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick.
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So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right?
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So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city.
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One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world
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for changing the impact that we have on the planet
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is changing the way that we live in cities.
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We're already an urban planet;
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that's especially true in the developed world.
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And people who live in cities in the developed world
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tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff.
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If we can change the dynamic,
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by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ...
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Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there,
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you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city.
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And they are doing density, new density,
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better than probably anybody else on the planet right now.
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They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars,
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which is a pretty great thing.
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So you have density. You also have growth management.
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You leave aside what is natural to be natural.
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This is in Portland. That is an actual development.
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That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity.
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They've bounded the city with a line.
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Nature, city. Nothing changes.
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Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments.
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You can start doing things like, you know,
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transit systems that actually work to transport people,
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in effective and reasonably comfortable manners.
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You can also start to change what you build.
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This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London,
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which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place.
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We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity,
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that recycle much of their water,
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that are much more comfortable than standard buildings,
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use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less.
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Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much.
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But once you also have people living
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in close proximity to each other,
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one of the things you can do is --
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as information technologies develop --
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you can start to have smart places.
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You can start to know where things are.
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When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them.
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When you share them, you end up using less.
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So one great example is car-share clubs,
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which are really starting to take off in the U.S.,
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have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example.
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If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week,
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do you really need your own car?
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Another thing that information technology lets us do
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is start figuring out how to use less stuff
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by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using.
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So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use,
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which I think is a pretty cool concept,
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although I think it ought to work the other way around,
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that it gets brighter the more you don't use.
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But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach.
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We could just re-label things.
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This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods,
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and on the other hand, off.
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How we build things can change as well.
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This is a bio-morphic building.
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It takes its inspiration in form from life.
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Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful,
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and also much more effective.
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This is an example of bio-mimicry,
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which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for.
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In this case, you have a shell design
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which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective.
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There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable.
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I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it.
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We're starting to cover this more and more.
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There's also neo-biological design,
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where more and more we're actually using life itself
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and the processes of life to become part of our industry.
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So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae.
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So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for
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of how to take the cities most of us live in,
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and turn them into Bright Green cities.
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But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in.
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They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world.
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And there's a statistic I often like to use,
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which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days,
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a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days.
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I was giving a talk about two months ago,
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and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me
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and was really flustered, and he said, look,
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you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong.
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It's every seven days.
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So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days,
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and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in.
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Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly.
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They don't have existing infrastructure;
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they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty,
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and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out
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how to do things in new ways.
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So what do we need in order to make developing nation
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megacities into Bright Green megacities?
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Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging.
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And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere.
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The idea behind leapfrogging is that
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if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation
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where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need,
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there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right?
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That you're much better off, almost universally,
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looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology.
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One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right?
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All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones,
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skipping the whole landline stage.
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If there are landlines in many developing world cities,
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they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot
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and cost enormous amounts of money.
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So I rather like this picture here.
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I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone.
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So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society.
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We've heard all about this here this week,
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so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say
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what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies.
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The second thing is tools for collaboration,
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be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems
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which encourage collaboration. Right?
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When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate,
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you get different kinds of solutions.
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And those solutions are accessible in a different way
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to people who don't have capital. Right?
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So, you know, we have open source software,
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we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions.
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And those things lead to things like this.
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This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo.
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This is a pretty remarkable program
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using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines,
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and basically sort of abandoned buildings --
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has put together a bunch of community centers
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where people can come in, get high-speed internet access,
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learn computer programming skills for free.
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And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo.
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And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo.
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I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter)
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So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion.
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And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging
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is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself,
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and re-categorizing itself in ways
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that have less and less to do with most of us in this room.
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So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right?
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You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels.
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It's doing something new. There's new things happening.
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There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things.
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Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "City of God?"
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Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it.
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And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way.
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You have other radical examples
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where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out.
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These are people who have just been visited by
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the Internet bookmobile in Uganda.
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And who are waving their first books in the air,
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which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know?
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So you also have the ability for people to start coming together
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and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways,
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in ways that haven't happened before.
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And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week,
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are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions,
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is we've got to craft new political realities.
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And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities,
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not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan,
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what have you, but here at home as well.
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Another world is possible.
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And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right?
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We tweak that a lot.
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We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here.
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That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine
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there being a different, vague possibility out there,
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but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility.
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We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil.
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How many people knew of Lula before today?
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OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that.
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So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions,
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but one of the things that he's doing is,
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he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that
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completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue
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into a whole new way of global collaboration.
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I would keep your eye on this fellow.
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Another example of this sort of second superpower thing
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is the rise of these games that are what we call "serious play."
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We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere.
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This is from "A Force More Powerful." It's a little screenshot.
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"A Force More Powerful" is a video game that,
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while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage
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in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter)
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Here's another one. This is from a game called "Food Force,"
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which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp.
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These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way
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to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world,
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in people's interest in and passion for democracy.
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We get so little news about the developing world
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that we often forget that there are literally
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millions of people out there struggling to change things
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to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.
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And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough.
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But it's happening all over the place,
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and these tools are part of what's making it possible.
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Now when you add all those things together,
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when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools,
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you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get?
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Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world.
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You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world.
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You get -- this is a building in Hyderabad, India.
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It's the greenest building in the world.
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You get grassroots solutions, things that work
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for people who have no capital or limited access.
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You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains.
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You get access to distance medicine.
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These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs
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to access databases that have information
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that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner.
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You get new tools for people in the developing world.
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These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there,
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for whom nightfall means darkness,
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to have a new means of operating.
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These are refrigerators that require no electricity;
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they're pot within a pot design.
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And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems.
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Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap
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and available to people in the developing world.
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Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight.
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Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area,
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will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable.
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Here's a way of transporting water.
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I just love this, you know -- I mean carrying water is such a drag,
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and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right?
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I mean, that's a great design.
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This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw.
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Basically you can suck any water through this
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and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips.
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So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this.
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This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever.
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This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout,
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which pumps water as kids play. You know?
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Seriously -- give that one a hand, it's pretty great.
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And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right?
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We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020
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because of climate change and political instability.
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How do we help people like that?
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Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs
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that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet.
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Some of those designs include models for acting,
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such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps.
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New models for pedagogy for the displaced.
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And we have new tools.
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This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere.
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Does anyone know what this is?
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Audience: It detects landmines.
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Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower.
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If you are living in one of the places
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where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered,
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you can fling these seeds out into the field.
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And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines,
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their roots will detect the chemicals in them,
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and where the flowers turn red you don't step.
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Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know?
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(Applause)
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I also love it because it seems to me
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that the example, the tools we use to change the world,
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ought to be beautiful in themselves.
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You know, that it's not just enough to survive.
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We've got to make something better than what we've got.
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And I think that we will.
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Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells,
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I think that better things are on the way.
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I think that, in fact, that "all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning.
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All that the human mind has accomplished
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is but the dream before the awakening."
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I hope that that turns out to be true.
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The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will.
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Thank you very much.
17:08 - 17:10

(Applause)

Title:: The route to a sustainable future
Speaker:: Alex Steffen
Description:: Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity’s ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.

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Video Language:: English
Team:: closed TED
Project:: TEDTalks
Duration:: 17:10

	TED edited English subtitles for The route to a sustainable future
	TED added a translation

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The route to a sustainable future

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