Talks Majora Carter's tale of urban renewal

Talks Majora Carter's tale of urban renewal

About this talk

In an emotionally charged talk, MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer most from flawed urban policy.


If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large, urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger.

The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog: an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront, despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste. A sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city.

So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a 10,000 dollar seed grant initiative seed grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river because of all the lovely facilities that I'd mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me -- and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx.

And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way. And the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that 10,000 dollar seed grant more than 300 times into a three million dollar park.

And, in the fall, I'm actually going to -- I exchange marriage vows with my beloved. Thank you very much. That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. (Laughter) (Applause)

But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coalmine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.

Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility -- which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high, even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. 50 percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line. 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy.

Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common?

Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking -- (Laughter) -- graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, travelled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good. (Laughter)

But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds, with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other.

So how did things get so different for us? In the late 40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding.

Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work, nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that is bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough.

Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind.

Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue -- and as redesigned by Matthews-Nielsen landscape architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that.

As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restorations, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green collar jobs -- then the people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development.

We also built the city's -- New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends! So -- (Laughter) -- so cool! Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too.

Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: we need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway -- (Laughter) (Applause)

OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight. Or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine?

Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through, like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later if you want to know. But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. At present, that's not happening in New York CIty. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to proposed big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues.

Now let's get this straight. I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And you probably all have it, and if you haven't, you need to. So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization.

Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking: a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly influential mayor named Enrique Penalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogatanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped. Because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget at that. We have no excuse in this country. I'm sorry. But the bottom line is, their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather to provide opportunities for all Bogatanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the US. But Bogota's example has the power to change that.

You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time!

Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer. (Applause)

What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. (Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. (Applause)

I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing -- we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ciao bellos! (Applause)

Talks Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

About this talk

The man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate.

Because of what I'm about to say, I really should establish my green credentials. When I was a small boy, I took my pledge as an American, to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country. Its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife. And I've stuck to that. Stanford, I majored in ecology and evolution. 1968, I put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Was "mister natural" for a while.

And then worked for the Jerry Brown administration. The Brown administration, and a bunch of my friends, basically leveled the energy efficiency of California. So it's the same now, 30 years later. Even though our economy has gone up 80 percent, per capita. And we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state. California is basically the equivalent of Europe, in this.

This year, Whole Earth Catalog has a supplement that I'll preview today, called Whole Earth Discipline. The dominant demographic event of our time is this screamingly rapid urbanization that we have going on. By mid-century we'll be about 80 percent urban. And that's mostly in the developing world, where that's happening. It's interesting. Because history is driven to a large degree by the size of cities. The developing world now has all of the biggest cities. And they are developing three times faster than the developed countries. And nine times bigger. It's qualitatively different. They are the drivers of history, as we see by looking at history.

1,000 years ago this is what the world looked like. Well we now have a distribution of urban power similar to what we had 1,000 years ago. In other words, the rise of the West, dramatic as it was, is over. The aggregate numbers are absolutely overwhelming. 1.3 million people a week, coming to town, decade after decade. What's really going on? Well, what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out. Subsistence farming is drying up basically.

People are following opportunity into town. And this is why. I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and it's because I never lived in one. (Laughter) Because in town -- This is the bustling squatter city of Kibera, near Nairobi -- They see action. They see opportunity. They see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in back in the subsistence farm.

As you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics. There is plenty going on. They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative. The aggregate numbers now are that basically squatters, all one billion of them, are building the urban world. Which means they're building the world. Personally, one by one, family by family, clan by clan, neighborhood by neighborhood. They start flimsy and they get substantial as time goes by. They even build their own infrastructure. Well, steal their own infrastructure, at first. Cable TV, water, the whole gamut, all gets stolen. And then gradually gentrifies.

It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity. Not the working slums, they help create prosperity. So in a town like Mumbai, which is half slums, it's 1/6th of the GDP of India. Social capital in the slums is at its most urban and dense. These people are valuable as a group. And that's how they work.

There is a lot of people who think about all these poor people, "Oh there's terrible things. We've got to fix their housing." It used to be, "Oh we've got to get them phone service." Now they're showing us how they do their phone service. Famine mostly is a rural event now. There are things they care about. And this is where we can help. And the nations they're in can help. And they are helping each other solve these issues.

And you go to a nice dense place like this slum in Mumbai. You look at that lane on the right. And you can ask, "Okay what's going on there?" The answer is, "Everything." This is better than a mall. It's much denser. It's much more interactive. And the scale is terrific. The main event is, these are not people crushed by poverty. These are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can. They're helping each other do it. They're doing it through an outlaw thing, the informal economy. The informal economy, it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics. It's not supposed to be there, but it's huge. We don't understand how it works yet. But we have to.

Furthermore, people in the informal economy, the gray economy, as time goes by, crime is happening around them. And they can join the criminal world. Or they can join the legitimate world. We should be able to make that choice easier for them to get toward the legitimate world. Because if we don't, they will go toward the criminal world. There's all kinds of activity.

In Dharavi the slum performs not only a lot of services for itself, but it performs services for the city at large. And one of the main events are these ad-hoc schools. Parents pool their money to hire some local teachers to a private, tiny, unofficial school. Education is more possible in the cities. And that changes the world. So you see some interesting, typical, urban things.

So one thing slammed up against another, such as in Sao Paulo here. That's what cities do. That's how they create value, is by slamming things together. In this case, supply right next to demand. So the maids and the gardeners and the guards that live in this lively part of town on the left walk to work, in the boring, rich neighborhood.

Proximity is amazing. We are learning about how dense proximity can be. Connectivity between the city and the country is what's going to keep the country good. Because the city has interesting ways of doing things. This is what makes cities -- (Applause) This is what makes cities so green in the developing world.

Because people leave the poverty trap, an ecological disaster of subsistence farms, and head to town. And when they're gone the natural environment starts to come back very rapidly. And those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops to send food to the new growing markets in town. So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road, or with a good cellphone connection. And ideally some grid electrical power.

So the event is, we're a city planet. That just happened. More than half. The numbers are considerable. A billion live in the squatter cities now. Another billion is expected. That's more than a sixth of humanity living a certain way. And that will determine a lot of how we function.

Now, for us environmentalists, maybe the greenest thing about the cities is they diffuse the population bomb. People get into town. The immediately have fewer children. They don't even have to get rich yet. Just the opportunity of coming up in the world means they will have fewer, higher-quality kids, and the birthrate goes down radically.

Very interesting side effect here, here's a slide from Phillip Longman. Shows what is happening. As we have more and more old people, like me, and fewer and fewer babies. And they are regionally separated. What you're getting is a world which is old folks, and old cities, going around doing things the old way, in the north. And young people in brand new cities they're inventing, doing new things, in the south. Where do you think the action is going to be?

Shift of subject. Quickly drop by climate. The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse than we think, faster than we think. Climate is a profoundly complex, nonlinear system, full of runaway positive feedbacks, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. Here's just a few samples. We're going to keep being surprised. And almost all the surprises are going to be bad ones.

From your standpoint this means great increase in climate refugees, over the coming decades. And what goes along with that, which is resource wars and chaos wars, as we're seeing in Darfur. That's what drought does. It brings carrying capacity down. And there's not enough carrying capacity to support the people. And then you're in trouble.

Shift to the power situation. Baseload electricity is what it takes to run a city, or a city planet. So far there is only three sources of baseload electricity, coal, some gas, nuclear and hydro. Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green. Coal is what is causing the climate problems. And everyone will keep burning it, because it's so cheap, until governments make it expensive. Wind and solar can't help, because so far we don't have a way to store that energy.

So with hydro maxed out, coal, and lose the climate, or nuclear, which is the current operating low-carbon source, and maybe save the climate. And if we can eventually get good solar in space, that also could help. Because remember, this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world in the villages and in the cities.

So, between coal and nuclear, compare their waste products. If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear, the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a Coke can. Whereas a coal-burning plant, a normal one gigawatt coal plant, burns 80 rail cars of coal a day. Each car having 100 tons. And it puts 18 thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the air. So and then when you compare the lifetime emissions of these various energy forms, nuclear is about even with solar and wind. And ahead of solar. Oh, I'm sorry. With hydro and wind, and ahead of solar.

And does nuclear really compete with coal? Just ask the coal miners in Australia. That's where you see some of the source, not from my fellow environmentalists, but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power. Well the good news is that the developing world, but frankly, the whole world, is busy building, and starting to build, nuclear reactors. This is good for the atmosphere. It's good for their prosperity.

I want to point out one interesting thing, which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower. It's supposed to be, I don't know, local solar and wind and cogeneration, and good things like that. But frankly micro-reactors which are just now coming on, might serve even better.

The Russians, who started this, are building floating reactors, for their new passage, where the ice is melting, north of Russia. And they're selling these floating reactors, only 35 megawatts, to developing countries. Here's the design of an early one from Toshiba. It's interesting, say, to take a 25-megawatt, 25 million watts, and you compare it to the standard big iron of an ordinary Westinghouse or Ariva, which is 1.2, 1.6 billion watts. These things are way smaller. They're much more adaptable. Here's an American design from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Here's another American design that came out of Los Alamos, and is now commercial.

Almost all of these are not only small, they are proliferation proof. They're typically buried in the ground. And the innovation is moving very rapidly. So I think microreactors is going to be important for the future. In terms of proliferation, nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity. And that's why 10 percent of the electricity in this room, 20 percent of electricity in this room is probably nuclear. Half of that is coming from dismantled warheads from Russia. Soon to be joined by our dismantled warheads. And so I would like to see the GNEP program, that was developed in the Bush administration, go forward aggressively. And I was glad to see that president Obama supported the nuclear fuel bank strategy when he spoke in Prague the other week.

One more subject. Genetically engineered food crops, in my view, as a biologist, have no reason to be controversial. My fellow environmentalists, on this subject, have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful. Despite their best efforts, genetically engineered crops are the most rapidly successful agricultural innovation in history. They're good for the environment because they enable no-till farming, which leaves the soil in place, getting healthier from year to year. Also keeps less carbon dioxide going from the soil into the atmosphere. They reduce pesticide use. And they increase yield. Which allows you to have your agricultural area be smaller. And therefore more wild area is freed up.

By the way, this map from 2006 is out of date because it shows Africa still under the thumb of Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth from Europe. And they're finally getting out from under that. And biotech is moving rapidly in Africa, at last.

This is a moral issue. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics met on this issue twice in great detail and said it is a moral imperative to make genetically engineered crops readily available. Speaking of imperatives, geoengineering is taboo now, especially in government circles, though I think there was a DARPA meeting on it a couple of weeks ago. But it will be on your plate, not this year but pretty soon. Because some harsh realizations are coming along. This is a list of them.

Basically the news is going to keep getting more scary. There will be events, like 35,000 people dying of a heat wave, which happened a while back. Like cyclones coming up toward Bangladesh. Like wars over water, such as in the Indus. And as those events keep happening we're going to say, "Okay, what can we do about that really?"

But there's this little problem with geoengineering. What body is going to decide? Who gets to engineer? How much they do. Where they do it. Because everybody is downstream, downwind of whatever is done. And if we just taboo it completely we could lose civilization. But if we just say "OK, China, you're worried, you go ahead. You geoengineer your way. We'll geoengineer our way. That would be considered and act of war by both nations. So this is very interesting diplomacy coming along. I should say, it is more practical than people think.

Here is an example that climatologists like a lot. One of the dozens of geoengineering ideas. This one came from the sulfur dioxide from Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Cooled the earth by half a degree. There was so much ice in 1992, the following year, that there was a bumper crop of polar bear cubs who were known as the Pinatubo cubs. To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year. That's nothing, compared to all of the the other things we may be trying to do about energy.

Just to run by another one, this is a plan to brighten the reflectance of ocean clouds, by atomizing seawater. That would brighten the albedo of the whole planet. A nice one, because it can happen lots of little ways in lots of little places, is by copying the ancient Amazon indians who made good agricultural soil by pyrolizing, smoldering, plant waste. And biochar fixes large quantities of carbon while it's improving the soil.

So here is where we are. Nobel Prize-winning climatologist Paul Crutzen calls our geological era the Anthropocene, the human-dominated era. We are stuck with its obligations. In the Whole Earth Catalog, my first words were, "We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it." The first words of Whole Earth Discipline are, "We are as Gods, and have to get good at it." Thank you. (Applause)