NINA HALL

NINA HALL

/

Author of Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local
Assistant Professor · International Relations · Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe)

Digital advocacy organizations are recognized as influential actors by the media, politicians, and some academics. In 2016, GetUp, an Australian digital advocacy organization, was named by the Australian Financial Review as one of the top ten actors with ‘covert power’ in Australia.1 Campact in Germany has powerfully mobilized public opinion against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. MoveOn was one of the ‘leading advocacy organizations’ mobilizing people against the Iraq War in the United States. Meanwhile, Leadnow, a digital advocacy organization in Canada, helped to unseat Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian federal election. This new model of advocacy organization has spread around the world. Nineteen digital advocacy organizations claim to have a total of over 20 million members. What drove the global spread of digital advocacy organizations?

ALBERTO SAVOIA

ALBERTO SAVOIA

/

Google’s 1st Engineering Director · Innovation Agitator Emeritus
Author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed

As much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. I think the reason it was so successful is because innovations and new ideas, they compound. They build one upon the other. So the reason why ads was so successful for Google is because search was so successful for Google. So when you have search and you have billions of people coming in every day, maybe every hour, and searching all kinds of things, you have this treasure trove of data. If you have billion searches per day, you know how many experiments can you run? And so Google is very famous for doing a lot of A/B experiments. That's how we collect the data. So what actually enabled Google to be so successful and to grow is this mental attitude, which is the same one that Amazon and some of these really successful technology companies have, of doing a lot of experiments on small samples and continually refining their data based on that. If you're dealing with a lot of people, you can do those experiments and that's why these companies are successful. The sad thing or what happens with companies that do not operate in that way, that do not try to operate on data and do all of those experiments, those are the ones that are left behind. Innovation is experimentation.

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

MONA SARFATY & EDWARD MAIBACH

/

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

/

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.

JACK HORNER

JACK HORNER

/

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.

DAVID FARRIER

DAVID FARRIER

/

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

/

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.