MAYA VAN ROSSUM

MAYA VAN ROSSUM

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Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations · Leader of Delaware Riverkeeper Network
Author of The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment

What is a Green Amendment? It is language that recognizes the rights of all people to clean water and clean air, a stable climate, and healthy environments, and obligates the government to protect those rights and the natural resources of the state for the benefit of all the people in the state, or if it was a federal green amendment in the United States, and they become obliged to protect those environmental rights and those natural resources for the benefit of both present and future generations, that's functionally what it does. But to help people understand what it accomplishes, a green amendment actually obligates the government to recognize and protect our environmental rights in the same, most powerful way we recognize and protect the other fundamental freedoms we hold dear. Things like the right to free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights, and private property rights. We all know how powerfully they are protected from government overreach and infringement. Well, when we have Green Amendments, now the environment and our environmental rights are added to that list of highest constitutional freedoms and protections.

BRITT WRAY

BRITT WRAY

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Author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
Broadcaster and Researcher Working on Climate Change and Mental Health

I think the general waking up that I'm seeing around me in so many different parts of society, people from all walks understanding that this is here, it's not a future threat. It's active now. We need to get smart about addressing it. A lot of people are also asking themselves how can I be of service? What can I do at this time? How am I going to be? And you know, the more climate job boards and networking communities and sites of bringing people together to do that work of figuring out how they're going to go on their climate journey while infusing it with a sense of joy, with a sense of how can we make this fun, right? How can we reshift so this is not just focusing on the negative, but really focusing on what we want to be building and what is abundant and the better life that we're working towards? All of that has been popping up a lot and that gives me an honest sense of hope. So a lot of it is about that relationality, creating conditions of solidarity that bring a sense of stability and security. Even though there's a lot of uncertainty about what the impacts will be and how they're going to affect us, each and every one of us, in the decades ahead. There needs to, amidst all that uncertainty, be other things that can undergird a child and make them feel held, safe, secure, and like they belong to a protective community that's thinking and feeling with them through this.

JAY FAMIGLIETTI

JAY FAMIGLIETTI

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Hydrologist, Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security, U of Saskatchewan
Host of the Podcast What About Water?

I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are somewhat loosely related to climate change and they are impacted by climate change. That's sometimes part of the reason why it gets split off because it's thought of as maybe an infrastructure problem, but you know, the changing extremes, the aridification of the West, the increasing frequency, the increasing droughts, these broad global patterns that I've been talking about, that I've been looking at with my research – that's all climate change. Just 100% climate change, a hundred percent human-driven. And so it does need to be elevated in these climate change discussions.

BRUCE MAU

BRUCE MAU

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Award-winning Designer, Artist & Educator
Co-founder & CEO of Massive Change Network
Author/Co-author of Mau MC24 · The Nexus · S, M, L, XL

I would like them to know just how powerful they are, that they have the power to shape the world. At some point, I realized that the world is produced. The world is designed and produced, and since we designed and produced it, we can redesign it. And you can play a part in designing it. You can play a part in that production. It doesn't have to happen to you. And I think, for too many people, too much power and too much control is concentrated in too few hands. People need to have the power to control and design their own life.

PHILIP FERNBACH

PHILIP FERNBACH

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Co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Cognitive Scientist · Co-Director of Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making, CU Boulder

The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic. People are capable of the most remarkable feats, achievements that defy the gods. We went from discovering the atomic nucleus in 1911 to megaton nuclear weapons in just over forty years. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and developed genetically modified tomatoes. And yet we are equally capable of the most remarkable demonstrations of hubris and foolhardiness. Each of us is error-prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant… How is it that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance? How have we mastered so much despite how limited our understanding often is?

KENT H. REDFORD

KENT H. REDFORD

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Co-author of Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology
Principal at Archipelago Consulting · Former VP for Conservation Science & Strategy, Wildlife Conservation Society

The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it. It amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predominantly devoted to trying to make us healthier people, and they range from some really exciting work on tumor biology to work on the microbiome, which is all of the thousands and tens of thousands of species that live on our lips, our mouths, our guts, our skin. And in agriculture, it's primarily directed at crop genetics, trying to improve the productivity of crops, the nutritional value of crops, the ability of crops to respond to climate change, and a whole variety of other things. Some people may have heard of one of these tools called CRISPR used to very precisely alter the sequences of DNA.

LARS CHITTKA

LARS CHITTKA

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Author of The Mind of a Bee
Founder of the Research Centre for Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

The world of bees is under threat, and that is not because bees are singled out, but because bees live in the environment that we all share and they are a kind of a canary in the coal mine for what's going on more largely in destroying our environment. And in a sense they are, I think, a useful sort of mascot and icon to highlight these troubles, but they are only a signpost of other things that are also under threat. We need the bee for our own food because they pollinate our crops, and they pollinate the flowers that we enjoy, but I think their utility for us is not the only reason to support them and their environment. I think the growing appreciation that the world that surrounds us is full of sophisticated and unique minds places on us a kind of onus and obligation to preserve the diversity of these minds that are out there and make sure that they continue to thrive.

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

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Executive Director & Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health
Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication

Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.

So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.

LEX VAN GEEN

LEX VAN GEEN

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Renowned Arsenic and Lead Specialist
Research Professor · Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory · Columbia University

So this was maybe nine months after the fire in Notre Dame, and I had been struck visually by the fire, the yellow smoke, which is a telltale indicator of lead. The fact that 400 tons of lead constituted the covering of the roof of the cathedral. And a lot of that had volatilized, presumably, but no one really knew how much. So that got me thinking, and I happened to be in Paris at the time, so I thought if it's so much lead, could it be that it affected the population living within say a kilometer of the cathedral? I thought there wasn't really a lot of clear information about what had happened, and what had been measured. I thought some more openness and transparency was needed.

DAVID R. MONTGOMERY

DAVID R. MONTGOMERY

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Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington · MacArthur Fellow ’08
Co-author of What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health · The Hidden Half of Nature

When you dig into the medical literature, 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States are diet-related chronic diseases. And so one of the hopeful messages that I think comes out of The Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, and What Your Food Ate is that what we do to the land, essentially we do to us. And what's good for the land is good for us. So if we think about farming differently, we can actually enjoy ripple effects that are not only beneficial to the farmers in terms of reduced costs for fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel, but it could also translate into better human health outcomes at a population level.

JACK HORNER

JACK HORNER

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Renowned Dinosaur Paleontologist
Technical Advisor on all Jurassic Park / Jurassic World Films

I found my first fossil when I was six years old. And I found my first dinosaur bone when I was eight, my first dinosaur skeleton when I was 13. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a paleontologist, and I didn't think there was much hope for it, though. I was doing very poorly in school. I think I was always a pretty positive kid. And so even though I wasn't doing well in school, I was really happy about the fact that I was finding all these cool fossils, and I was making collections. I don't know when it came to me that I would do this, but I think I just was born this way.

CHRIS COULTER

CHRIS COULTER

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CEO of GlobeScan - Co-author of All In: The Future of Business Leadership

While we need action, I think at the same time, the world and the agenda are moving so quickly. We're learning more all the time. We really can't skip the dialogue part, and we need to create more space and more opportunity to think through - What are we trying to do? What have we learned? How do we move smarter and more quickly? So it's not just about doing more action constantly. It's taking stock consistently because the agenda keeps evolving at a more rapid pace than it has historically, which means we need to find more places for proper dialogue that are springboards for this action, but we shouldn't discount the fact that we've got to sometimes just stop and chat and listen and learn and that makes us better and stronger.

DAVID FARRIER

DAVID FARRIER

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Author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils · Anthropocene Poetics
Professor of Literature & the Environment · University of Edinburgh.

Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.

JOHN BEATON

JOHN BEATON

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Founder, Director & Co-Visionary of Fairhaven Farm

What's trending now with beginning farmers is that it is creating this kind of community connection. It's bringing people to the farm. It's connecting them to their food source. That creates community. It helps cultivate culture and connectivity, and so I think overall, it's like the landscape and agriculture as a whole is shifting towards a different direction.

BRUCE PIASECKI

BRUCE PIASECKI

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NYT Bestselling Author of Doing More with One Life
Founder of AHC Group

I concluded that stress is good for a creative person and that we, in fact, flower under stress. We bloom under stress: A father's death. He would never finish this thought path because he had so little to go on. For decades, he had blamed everyone he knew for his father’s death. Having been raised by his grandmother, mother, and sister, he had to invent his masculinity—from muscle and bone to making his place in a world of markets.

BRUCE PIASECKI

BRUCE PIASECKI

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NYT Bestselling Author of A New Way to Wealth · Doing More with Teams
Founder of AHC Group

Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the ship and all we had a chance to do was look at each other. I’ve come to believe is that not only is the future near you can design your own life.