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.

JEAN WEINER

JEAN WEINER

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Goldman Environmental Prize Winner
Founder of Fondation pour la Protection de la Biodiversité Marine in Haiti

We’re coming out of one of the worst times for resource exploitation, waste and everything related to that waste of resources, so trying to set the example, especially for my kids, recycling, trying to be reasonable about purchasing things, about where things end up after you’re done using them, just in general being careful about what you do, what impacts there are down the line. Even for them already, they’re 18 and 20 now–What are you going to do to try to protect the planet for your kids? Already trying to put that mindset for them because it’s very difficult for our generation to change the way it has done things for so long, but trying to at least bring that change. Be responsible, be reasonable, think about the impacts.


JOHANNES STRIPPLE & HARRIET BULKELEY

JOHANNES STRIPPLE & HARRIET BULKELEY

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Carbon Ruins · Climate Futures · Climaginaries · Earth Systems Governance Project

Our starting point was that a lot of the stories we tell about future worlds are quite poor. It’s not stories that are meeting the world as it is now. It’s difficult for people to inhabit the kinds of worlds that we imagine through scenarios or modelling, so there is a kind of distance between where we are now and the life worlds of a decarbonized or a post-fossil world.

MATS HJELM

MATS HJELM

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Artist, Documentary Filmmaker & Multimedia Installation Creator

Art can be part healing process. There's a lot of research being done. People heal faster a garden rather than a parking lot, for example. The theory is that an opening in the woods with a little bit of water is probably the most healing place. That's the safest because that's what we have built-in as humans as the safe spot. The ocean is not safe, but the little pond. So, what I've done in this particular project with the radiotherapy rooms is that I've taken images from healing wells, partly from Stellenbosch National Park in Capetown, in Rio. I've been filming these water surfaces. I’ve been filming the trees through the water surface basically to create that water pond and the trees around, but from these places that have kind of a healing history.

PATON MILLER

PATON MILLER

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Artist & World Traveler inspired by Nature & Indigenous Cultures

When we moved back to Hawaii and lived on Molokai. I was teaching at the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony, we had no money. And I was spearfishing, not for sport, but to get food for my family. And it was a beautiful time of our lives. We were so poor, but we were not poor. Poor is a state of mind. We were without money, but we were having so much fun.

MELISSA CRISTINA MARQUEZ

MELISSA CRISTINA MARQUEZ

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Shark Scientist, Science Communicator, TV Presenter & Author

A lot of people when you think of sharks, you think of hammerheads, great white sharks, tiger sharks, but there’s so much more diversity than just that. There’s over 500 different species and on average we’re discovering new species every two weeks, not just of sharks, but also their cousins, the stingrays, skates and sometimes the chimeras as well. And so knowing that diversity exists, for me it’s really important to get that message out there.