TED Talks Daily
What will you do with your one wild and precious planet? | How to Be a Better Human
03 Mar 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today we have a special treat for you, an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective handpicked for you by us. TED has tons of podcasts that go way beyond the TED Talk that help you spark your curiosity. For more, visit audiocollective.ted.com and check out How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. When I was a senior in college, I lived in a big off-campus house with a bunch of friends. And we made some perfunctory attempts at cleaning the house and taking care of basic maintenance. But I would not say that having nine college guys living in your property is going to lead to sparkling hygiene, should we say.
So when we moved out of this house, the landlord kept most of our security deposit. And we were outraged by that. I mean, come on, we weren't that bad. But the landlord insisted that he needed it to pay for professional cleaners. And worse, when he took our money, he also gave us this full on guilt trip. He said, and I quote, I thought you were good guys. You seem to care.
Now, I would like to think that I have become much better at being a responsible caretaker of the places that I call home these days. But when it comes to all of us as a species, we are not doing so great for planet Earth. We are on track to lose our full security deposit. Today's guest, Bill McKibben, he has spent decades trying to teach humanity how to be better tenants of this planet.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989, and since then he has written over a dozen more, becoming one of the most prominent environmentalists around. Bill is currently a leader of 350.org, an environmental advocacy group that he co-founded. Their goal is to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy by building a global grassroots movement.
Bill is also the founder and a leader of Third Act, which mobilizes Americans over the age of 60 to work towards climate and racial justice. And as you can tell, just by those two organizations, there is a lot to talk about with Bill. He is working overtime on being a better human.
And despite Bill's very busy schedule and important work that he does, he always makes time to remember what it is that he is fighting for, the profound beauty and majesty of this planet. Bill lives in Vermont, where he spoke with me remotely. And here's a clip about his love for that place in particular.
One of the things I'm grateful for about living where I live is that the sky gets dark at night. There's something very nice about being small. I remember taking a bunch of kids from the city out hiking and camping one night. These were high school kids. And we got out and stepped away from the campfire so we could really see the sky.
And I was showing them the Milky Way, which they'd never seen before. And one of them said appropriately, you know, freak me out, dude. And I remember thinking that's probably really the moment at which we became sort of humans when some ape looked up at the sky and was like, freak me out, dude.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Bill McKibben share about climate change?
I struggle to even word the question.
So we all know the things that we can do in our personal lives, and I'm sure many people are doing a lot of them. But if you think about it, the scale of the problem that we face, it soon becomes clear that really the most important thing an individual can do is be somewhat less of an individual.
Join together with others in movements large enough to have some chance at changing those political and economic ground rules that keep us locked on this current path. That's why I helped start 350.org 20 years ago, the first global grassroots climate campaign and why we do this, why we founded Third Act to help those of us over 60 play our role and on and on and on.
If people are willing to, beyond whatever they're doing at home, plug in with others. then we may be able to make shifts large enough to really matter.
I'm sure the people who are listening right now are bought into the idea that this is important, but maybe are feeling a little bit like, okay, so where do I start? So what are some, let's say three things that someone who's listening can do to plug into that broader social change and actually make a difference?
First thing to do is just a basic point of understanding that there's two halves to this task. One, you could call the demand side and the other, the supply. We have to start using You know, heat pumps and electric vehicles for mobility and induction cooktops. And we have to have a lot of solar power and wind power and things. Those things are starting to roll out.
Really, the only real accomplishment legislatively of our Congress in the 30 some years we've known about all this was this Inflation Reduction Act last year, which puts a fair amount of money in the direction of some of those things. And that is a place where people can play a part on their own and in their community. So that's part of the battle.
But the other half is this question of supply side. To make that happen fast enough, we also have to shut down the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. It doesn't do any good to build solar panels if you're building lots of oil wells and gas fracking rigs and stuff at the same time. So that's why we work so hard to do things like shut down new pipelines and put land off limits for leasing.
So movements are essential for both these things. And you should find people doing this work. If you're under 30, the Sunrise Movement, the people who brought us the Green New Deal, they're fantastic. If you're over 60, the Third Act, tell your grandparents about it.
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Chapter 3: How did Bill McKibben's journey into environmentalism begin?
Multiply that by a thousand and try to imagine the world in which one lives. So our job is to hold that temperature increase as low as possible. Everything we do that's of significant importance size helps with that. And every tenth of a degree is really important. But it has to happen fast.
It seems like there was this moment during the pandemic where at great cost, we did have a vision of what an entirely different relationship to the economy, to travel, to the climate could be. And I'm certainly not trying to say that was a good thing. Obviously, that came at an incredible cost of human lives, of suffering, of poverty, of all sorts of issues. However...
It's been disheartening to me to see that we've kind of come out of this inflection point, and it seems like we're trying to claw back to exactly where we were. What doors did that open for you in terms of perceptions of the future and possibilities? And is there a way that a healthy planet can coexist with a healthy global economy?
The sense that it opened was a reminder to humans that sometimes they're not actually in charge. and that they have to figure out how to respond to larger forces. In this case, a microbe who, again, was not interested in compromising, was going to do what it was going to do, and we had to figure out how to get around it.
And we did, and it was a reminder of the remarkable power of science and engineering to help us do that. The sad part was also, though, the reminder of how confused, chaotic our process We've allowed our political and information life to become so that large parts of America were scared of, disdainful, suspicious of that kind of progress.
It's entirely possible to imagine a planet that managed to maintain its physical integrity and also had a well-working economy. In fact, far easier to imagine that than to imagine a well-working economy on the planet we're currently headed for.
Big new studies out of Oxford in the last year proved, I think, that making a rapid switch to renewable energy would save the world tens of trillions of dollars over the next couple of decades. Forget the damages from climate change, just the fact that you don't have to go buy more coal and gas and oil all the time. I mean, if you think about it for a minute,
What's the reason that the fossil fuel industry dislikes renewable energy so much and has worked so hard against it? It's because every morning when the sun rises above the horizon, it delivers your energy for free. And if you're Exxon, who spent the last hundred years getting people to write a check every month for their energy, that's the dumbest business plan the world's ever seen.
If you're looking for more business plans that don't make as much sense as they should, let me tell you about how we fund podcasting. It is through ads and we are going to take a break for some right now. We'll be right back. Genomics pioneer Robert Green says many parents want their healthy newborn's DNA screened for diseases that may or may not show up later in life.
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Chapter 4: What are the biggest challenges in addressing climate change?
We've got it. Now we just need to put it to use. And I have no idea what people are waiting for because the miracle, if we wanted it, I mean, that's magic. That's Hogwarts scale magic. Point a sheet of glass towards the sun and out comes heat and light and information and everything else that, you know, modernity consists of. The solar panels on my roof are powering our congregation here today.
That's actually the same for me, too. The solar panels on my roof here are powering both ends of this conversation are being powered by solar at this moment. There you go. A lot of the issue.
at least as far as the culture shift that needs to happen seems to me to be a little bit of having to admit that this framework that we've been operating under, that we can take whatever we want as much as we want and waste as much as we want was wrong. And we kind of need to apologize for that and make amends.
And there's a lot of people who don't like to apologize and they don't like to admit that they're wrong. And I, I wonder, sometimes it's framed as we have to figure out these new ideas, but it seems like actually a lot of these ideas are the ones that Native and Indigenous people had been and have been doing for a long time of being good stewards of the planet and being more communally minded.
If you're working on these issues, one of the first things you figure out is that an extraordinary amount of the leadership for the climate and environmental movement comes from Indigenous people on this continent and all over the world.
And one reason for that is that they're often in the firing line, you know, on top of land that people want to steal to get fossil fuel or on low-lying island nations that are about to get overrun by the sea and whatever. But it also has to do with what you're saying.
And I find power in the fact that the oldest, most ancient wisdom traditions on this planet, indigenous wisdom traditions, are old. find themselves very much in sync with the newest wisdom traditions on the planet.
And what they have in common is a sense that the conventional wisdom that most of the rest of us hold, that we're just going to keep on growing the size of things forever and so on, is not true. And I think that convergence is a very powerful moment or could be. And it's one of the reasons why it's so important that those are the people who are at the absolute forefront of this work.
Because of your work with Third Act, we've talked a lot about what older folks can do to be a part of this. What about a little bit on what young people who are just coming into their own independence and adulthood?
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