MIKE PONDSMITH

MIKE PONDSMITH

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Creator of Cyberpunk · Origins Award-Winning Game Designer

One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of those younger people are actually much nicer than they need to be. And they have to realize that this is going to be your world. It turns out the way you want to make it and so you should be thinking now about what you want out of this. What do you want that world to be? Do not wait around until the two generations beyond you have gone ahead and done it the way they want it because, by the time they get done, you’re not going to have the chance to shift it to where you want it. So start thinking now about where do you want to be? What is the future you want? And don’t be nice about it, just go ahead and start planning it now.

DR. JOERI ROGELJ

DR. JOERI ROGELJ

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Director of Research at Grantham Institute, Imperial College
Author on UN Environment Programme & Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

A key part of how I go about doing my research is being involved in policy discussions, policy conversations, and also by following the international climate negotiations very closely. Actually, I started my research career as a part of the Presidency of the International Climate Negotiations in 2009. After that I remained an advisor to country delegations in the international negotiations, particularly small island development states or least developed countries. That really helped me to get a sense of what the real questions are that they are struggling with.

TIEMEN TER HOEVEN

TIEMEN TER HOEVEN

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Founder & CEO of Roetz · Manufacturer of Circular Bicycles & e-Bikes

I think the next crisis is going to be a materials crisis. The whole point of moving from a zero-sum game–like who makes the best cheapest product at the lowest price and can find lowest labor somewhere around the world so someone can be happy with a new laundry machine and buy another one in five years–that’s not going to work for us.

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

ANTE CHENG & MATTHEW CHUANG

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Cinematographers Ante Cheng & Matthew Chuang
Blue Bayou starring Justin Chon & Alicia Vikander

The search for identity is something I think everyone goes through in their lives. It’s a constantly evolving answer. I think all of us can relate to the sense of belonging and what is home. Alicia Vikander’s scene was memorable to me. One of the rare times I cried while operating the camera.

There’s not really many stories about people who look like me in Australia, so I was just making films. How do I be invisible in a way and transcend whatever I’m shooting? It wasn’t until I came to the U.S…it was the first time I had to think about me being Asian and my experiences and how does that relate to what we’re telling in this film.

GARY GRIGGS

GARY GRIGGS

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Global Oceans Hero Award-Winner · Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences
Director Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz 1991 to 2017

Gary Griggs received his B.A. in Geological Sciences from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Oregon State University. He has been a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz since 1968 and was Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences from 1991 to 2017. His research and teaching have been focused on the coast of California and include coastal processes, hazards and engineering, and sea-level rise. Dr. Griggs has written over 185 articles for professional journals as well as authored or co-authored eleven books.

ANA CASTILLO

ANA CASTILLO

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Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead

One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

SAMUEL MYERS MD, MPH

SAMUEL MYERS MD, MPH

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Founding Director of Planetary Health Alliance
Principal Research Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

I think the environmental community has been guilty of a lot of catastrophism, a lot of statements like ‘Game Over for the Planet’, and we’ve painted a lot of very dark pictures about where we’re going, but when you look across these different sectors and all the solutions that are out there, there’s no reason to believe that our grandchildren couldn’t live in an incredibly exciting world.

DR. EBEN ALEXANDER

DR. EBEN ALEXANDER

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Neurosurgeon
Author of NYTimes #1 Bestseller Proof of Heaven, Seeking Heaven, The Map of Heaven & Living in a Mindful Universe.

Take care of yourself. Bring that love and kindness and compassion into your dealings with self and others. And this world will change dramatically. I think you’ll find great reason for optimism and hope and viewing the way our world can go, but it absolutely involves a change from the status quo from our current direction.

JIM JERMANOK

JIM JERMANOK

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Award-Winning Writer, Director, Producer, Speaker
& Author of Beyond The Craft: What You Need to Know to Make A Living Creatively!

I like uncovering truth about behaviour, about history. I think all artists are attracted to unveiling truth. I think it’s a mirror of our society, of our world. It’s the soul of our world.

PAULO SZOT

PAULO SZOT

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Tony Award-Winning Singer, Actor and Star of Chicago, the longest-running American Musical in Broadway History

All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That’s what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it’s all there. And I think that’s why the public relates so much to it.

PAUL SHAPIRO

PAUL SHAPIRO

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CEO of The Better Meat Co.
Author of Nat’l Bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

If you go fill up your car with gas in the United States, chances are high that probably about 10% of your gas is not actually coming from fossil fuels. It's coming from ethanol.You don't even contemplate the fact that there's ethanol in your gas. And I think that meat maybe come like that, where people will obtain meat. But the norm will be for that meat not to be totally animal in its nature. And I think that people will just have a different view of what meat is, and it will be far more diverse than what it is today.

TODD MILLER

TODD MILLER

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Journalist & Author
Build Bridges, Not Walls · Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration & Homeland Security

In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report titled something like An Abrupt Climate Scenario. They asked some independent researchers to look at what would happen in a worse case scenario. They found that the United States and Australia. They said that they would have to put up defensive fortresses “to stop unwanted starving immigrants”…

LORENDA RAMOU

LORENDA RAMOU

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Pianist, Musicologist & Concert Curator for Contemporary Music · Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens

As a child, music felt very natural for me. I didn’t feel I needed to put any effort into learning the piano. I wanted to find all the musical information that was there. What was the purpose of studying the piano? Suddenly the whole thing became so creative. I felt that the sound is something malleable and you can have an infinite number of possibilities and ways of phrasing and expressing, so that opened a whole new area of possibilities and I found this just fascinating.

ANTONELLA WILBY

ANTONELLA WILBY

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National Geographic Explorer
National Science Foundation Research Fellow · Contextual Robotics Institute, UCSD

I’m grateful for the fact that through my work I’ve had a lot of opportunities to go to places that a lot of people just simply won’t ever get a chance to go. I like having those opportunities to try to share with people what that’s like. I honestly had no idea I would ever be here. I’m from a working-class background, didn’t have a huge amount of opportunities but now I can and that’s one thing that I particularly enjoy.

IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI

IBRAHIM ALHUSSEINI

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Founder and CEO of FullCycle Fund

Is it okay that you benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else? Is that a way that you really feel like you are winning at life? If not, then reconsider what you’re doing and just realize that we all live in this inextricably connected closed sphere in the middle of space. Anything that harms one area harms every area. There is nobody who can escape dirty air, dirty water, dirty food, economic political disruptions, etc. We’re all in this together. So don’t fool yourself by thinking somehow you’re going to come out this unscathed and having ‘won’ while everybody else loses.

McKENZIE FUNK

McKENZIE FUNK

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Journalist & PEN Literary Award-Winning Author of Windfall

As a parent and especially through all this reporting, what I’ve tried to do is think through these solutions and these fixes we have for everything and make sure that we’re not forgetting…that we’re thinking about other people. Capitalism won’t do it. Self-interest isn’t going to do this for us. As silly as it is to think that empathy will do or caring about your fellow humans will do it, I don’t know what else there is to hope for. I don’t believe that people do stuff purely out of rational self-interest, this libertarian idea that I was quietly pushing against the entire time in Windfall. That we do things just for ourselves or just to make money–that’s not been the reality of my lifetime.

KAREN PINKUS

KAREN PINKUS

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Author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary
Professor of Italian & Comparative Literature, Cornell University

For many years I wrote, taught, and published about climate change from a more philosophical, existential point of view, especially thinking about deep time, but I did come back to fuels with my Fuel book in part for the fact that so much of the press and so much of public discourse confuses fuel and energy, and it’s still happening today. I thought about this so long and the same themes, the same tropes are still being recycled.

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

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Poet & Author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments

I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn’t know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall’ to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.

JESSA REED

JESSA REED

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Comedian & Host of Awakening Orientation Dept. & Soberish

That’s just always been something that’s been inspiring to me which is helping people from the wrong side of the tracks, the misunderstood, the addicted, helping people step into their power and believe in themselves.

KATHLEEN ROGERS

KATHLEEN ROGERS

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President · EARTHDAY.ORG


On the Importance of Climate Literacy & Training Programs
Not a single country in the world makes–probably one of the most important skills you’ll ever have–which is understanding the planet, a requirement. Nobody graduates from our high schools having those skills.