Speaker 1
So what we're trying to do in our project is take a step back, look at these little, positive experiments, survey all those innovations that are happening and wonder, if we foster those, if some of them combine, if they grow into something that's bigger, how does that change the world? What does that world look like? So what is a seed? When i say a seed of a good anthropocene? So it's a way of thinking, a way of doing. I could be an institution. It could be a technology. We require that they at least partially exist, at least in prototype form. These are things that are currently at the margins. They're not dominant. They have to contribute to a good anthropocene, at least according to some one. So we recognize that even in a room like this, there are many different ideas of what is good in a good anthropocene. And we have to be able to scale in some way, scale up, scale out, scale in, or somehow lead to a transformation that goes beyond just the experimental a stage. So i think of that as a pocket of the better future in the present that we want to grow. And so our aim in this project is to scope out some of those radical changes, and especially some of the ones that go beyond just incremental improvements that are often the focus of today's sustain ability dialogues. We talk about reducing pollution, or increasing environmental efficiency of ran. I want to look at something that's a little more radical than those conversations. And my assumption is that many of these seeds already exist in places around the world. We're trying to identify where they exist and understand how they occur, why they occur, and how we might grow them and foster them into something bigger. And by using these same seeds, we've also discovered that we can use these to imagine how they push out into the future and tell better stories to help in visiona positive realities. And once you start looking, ah, these seeds are everywhere. So i meant to tell you about a few examples, just ecause i find that that helps to give a sense of what these things are. So the first fund i'll start witha is a project called health in harmony. Ah, this was started by a doctor by the name of keenery webb who went to indonation borneo, got really upset about the loss of arangatan habitat there. Go back to that one a ann, decided to do something about it. And so what health and harmony does as they work with local communities. She started simply by spending a year just listening to these communities and saying, ok, we have a problem. We're losing this habitat what? What is going on here? Why is this happening? So spend a year listening, discovered that people were, ah, cutting down trees, not because they wanted to, but because someone in their family was getting sick, their daughter, their mother, their husband or wife, and they needed income to pay for medical care. And as a doctor, kenery said, ah, i see a solution to this. I will provide free or low cost health care to any community that commits to reducing deforestation. And so what have they seen? They see now a an over 60 % decrease in illegal logging and an increase in every human health indicator that they measure in this community after just five years. S the next example i want to talk about is in copenhagen. So the city of copenhagen decided a few years ago that they wanted to have organic food offered in every public cafeteria, so every hospital, every school, every government office. And as they started looking into how to make their cafeterias organic, they very quickly discovered that they couldn't simply serve the same meals. It was far too expensive to or to get organic meat. And so they started changing the menus, and the menus became more vegetarian. The menus became healthier. As the menus became healthier and more vegetarian, they started to realize, oh, you know, we've, we've been cooking all this food centrally and then just shipping it out to all these cafeterias where people are basically just reheating it and serving it. But let's train every to cook this food in these local cafeterias. And so after just a few years now, they've got healthy, healthier food that's being cooked locally, that's fresher, that tastes better in these cafeterias. And that's led to a whole bunch of other changes that go far beyond just changes in there in their cafeterias, to changes in waste stream management and other things. And then one last one i'll talk about, sondo smart city. This is a newly built smart city from scratcha just outside of sole, south korea. This was built from scratch on about 600 hectares of reclaimed land.