Carl Safina - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author

Carl Safina - Ecologist - Founding President of Safina Center - NYTimes Bestselling Author

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Ecologist, Founding President of Safina Center
NYTimes Bestselling Author of Becoming Wild · Song for the Blue Ocean · Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

So we tend to take living for granted. I think that might be the biggest limitation of human intelligence is to not understand with awe and reverence and love that we live in a miracle that we are part of and that we have the ability to either nurture or destroy. The living world is enormously enriching to human life. I just loved animals. They're always just totally fascinating. They're not here for us. They're just here like we're just here. They are of this world as much as we are of this world. They really have the same claim to life and death and the circle of being.

Highlights - Kent Redford - Co-author, ”Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

Highlights - Kent Redford - Co-author, ”Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

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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.

Kent Redford - Co-author of "Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

Kent Redford - Co-author of "Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology”

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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.

Highlights - David Montgomery - Prof., Earth and Space Sciences, UW - MacArthur Fellow ’08

Highlights - David Montgomery - Prof., Earth and Space Sciences, UW - MacArthur Fellow ’08

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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.

David Montgomery - Co-author of “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health”

David Montgomery - Co-author of “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health”

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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.

(Highlights) ROB PRINGLE

(Highlights) ROB PRINGLE

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Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Professor Princeton University · Pringle Lab

For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could you see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing entirely to be able to appreciate it on that level and care about it for the sheer beauty and magic and joy of being in a place that’s still so big and so wild. So that I think is the most important thing for the next generation.

ROB PRINGLE

ROB PRINGLE

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Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Professor Princeton University · Pringle Lab

For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing entirely to be able to appreciate it on that level and care about it for the sheer beauty and magic and joy of being in a place that’s still so big and so wild. So that I think is the most important thing for the next generation.

(Highlights) DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

(Highlights) DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

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Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree

Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

DR. SUZANNE SIMARD

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Professor of Forest Ecology
Author of Finding the Mother Tree

Think of yourself as a tree. You’ve got neighbours that you live beside for hundreds if not thousands of years, and none of you can move around, so you just have to communicate in other ways. And so trees have evolved to have these ways of communicating with each other, and they’re sophisticated, they’re nuanced. They include things like transmitting information through these root networks that link them together. They transmit information to each other through the air, so they perceive each other, they communicate and then they respond to each other. And that language is complex.

(Highlights) JASON W. MOORE

(Highlights) JASON W. MOORE

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Environmental Historian, Historical Geographer & Professor of Sociology · Binghamton University

We’re not waiting for the disasters to happen. They have happened. They are happening, and the disasters aren’t natural. They involve climate, but the disasters are very much made by the conditions of capitalist accumulation. We are not going to be able to grapple with the challenges of planetary crisis with the thinking that created planetary crisis.


JASON W. MOORE

JASON W. MOORE

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Environmental Historian, Historical Geographer & Professor of Sociology · Binghamton University

We’re not waiting for the disasters to happen. They have happened. They are happening, and the disasters aren’t natural. They involve climate, but the disasters are very much made by the conditions of capitalist accumulation. We are not going to be able to grapple with the challenges of planetary crisis with the thinking that created planetary crisis.


The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future w/ CRAIG KAUFFMAN - Highlights

The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future w/ CRAIG KAUFFMAN - Highlights

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Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon
Member of the United Nations Knowledge Network on Harmony with Nature

The term Rights of Nature tends to be applied to two different things. One is this underlying legal philosophy that is actually broader than just Rights of Nature, that’s probably better understood as ecological jurisprudence that may or may not be expressed in terms of rights, but because Rights of Nature is getting a lot of attention that term tends to be applied to represent this broader underlying philosophy. Of course, the other way it’s used it to refer to the legal provisions that explicitly recognize Rights for ecosystems.

CRAIG KAUFFMAN

CRAIG KAUFFMAN

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Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon
Member of the United Nations Knowledge Network on Harmony with Nature

The term Rights of Nature tends to be applied to two different things. One is this underlying legal philosophy that is actually broader than just Rights of Nature, that’s probably better understood as ecological jurisprudence that may or may not be expressed in terms of rights, but because Rights of Nature is getting a lot of attention that term tends to be applied to represent this broader underlying philosophy. Of course, the other way it’s used it to refer to the legal provisions that explicitly recognize Rights for ecosystems.