The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Earth Day the TED Way

It’s Earth Day, so what better time to spotlight some of the smartest, most compelling thinking in sustainability from the past few years, and what better place for these ideas to manifest themselves than the TED stage? Today, we’re curating our five favorite sustainability-related TED talks of the past five years — from eye-opening revelations to ideological landmarks.

CHRIS JORDAN

We’re longtime fans of photographic artist Chris Jordan, whose work captures otherwise alienating and thus meaningless numbers and statistics in incredibly powerful and emotionally impactful collages. His first TED talk is compelling introduction to his extraordinary work and the vision behind it.

Jordan’s most recent work focuses specifically on marine sustainability, which is a nice segue to…

SYLVIA EARLE

Winner of the 2009 TED Prize, legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle reveals a gripping look at what we’ve lost in the last 50 years and why that matters.

Last week, Earle’s TED Prize Wish came to life in the form of Mission Blue Voyage, the world’s first seaborne conference aboard the National Geographic Endeavor, focusing exclusively on water sustainability through a speaker lineup featuring the world’s most renowned ocean experts — marine scientists, deep sea explorers, technology innovators, policy makers, business leaders, environmentalists, activists and artists.

Many of the Mission Blue talks have been made available in the past week — we highly recommend all of them.

JANINE BENYUS

A few months ago, we raved about AskNature, a new biomimicry portal harnessing the power of this discipline as a potent cross-pollinator of design, engineering and science. This TED talk by founder Janine Benyus makes a strong and bold case for what biomimicry can do and where it is going.

Be sure to also watch Benyus’s first TED talk, if only to trace the incredible evolution of this sub-science over the past three years as more and more companies and inventors are embracing biomimicry as a real-world design solution and efficiency booster.

WILLIAM MCDONOUGH

The notion of cradle-to-cradle design may be staple of every industrial designer’s manifesto today, but it wasn’t always a must-have catchphrase. Five years ago, it was more likely to raise an eyebrow than a fist. It was eco-minded architect and designer William McDonough that first coined the phrase and began . His 2005 TED talk laid the groundwork for what has become one of the most essential cultural conversations of our time.

For me, design is the first signal of human intentions. So what are our intentions? ~ William McDonough

Today, this sort of holistic thinking about the design process is encouragingly widespread — something chronicled in another excellent piece of advocacy on the subject, Emily Pilloton’s Design Revolution: 100 Product That Empower People.

MICHAEL POLLAN

In early 2007, when the relationship between food and sustainability was as evident to mainstream America as that between particle energy and the velocity of light was to early humans, Michael Pollan began a conversation that was to shape our common understanding of health — in the broadest sense, human and environmental — for years to come. A few months before his Omnivore’s Dilemma became a national bestseller, Pollan gave a groundbreaking TED talk that launched the issue into the public conversation. Though the talk’s central arguments are common sense to anyone even marginally socially attuned today, it’s still worth watching if only for its status as a historical landmark of cultural dialogue, one that made an entire generation never look at food the same way again.

Pollan’s name has since become synonymous with sustainable agriculture, unleashing a slew of books, documentaries and other social commentary on the subject, including the excellent PBS series The Botany of Desire, starring Pollan himself.


Published April 22, 2010

https://www.themarginalian.org/2010/04/22/earth-day-ted-talks/

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