ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Stewart Brand - Environmentalist, futurist
Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ...

Why you should listen

With biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, the revival of extinct species is becoming possible. Stewart Brand plans to not only bring species back but restore them to the wild.

Brand is already a legend in the tech industry for things he’s created: the Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation, and the notion that “information wants to be free.” Now Brand, a lifelong environmentalist, wants to re-create -- or “de-extinct” -- a few animals that’ve disappeared from the planet.

Granted, resurrecting the woolly mammoth using ancient DNA may sound like mad science. But Brand’s Revive and Restore project has an entirely rational goal: to learn what causes extinctions so we can protect currently endangered species, preserve genetic and biological diversity, repair depleted ecosystems, and essentially “undo harm that humans have caused in the past.”

More profile about the speaker
Stewart Brand | Speaker | TED.com
Chris Anderson - TED Curator
After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

Why you should listen

Chris Anderson is the Curator of TED, a nonprofit devoted to sharing valuable ideas, primarily through the medium of 'TED Talks' -- short talks that are offered free online to a global audience.

Chris was born in a remote village in Pakistan in 1957. He spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his parents worked as medical missionaries, and he attended an American school in the Himalayas for his early education. After boarding school in Bath, England, he went on to Oxford University, graduating in 1978 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

Chris then trained as a journalist, working in newspapers and radio, including two years producing a world news service in the Seychelles Islands.

Back in the UK in 1984, Chris was captivated by the personal computer revolution and became an editor at one of the UK's early computer magazines. A year later he founded Future Publishing with a $25,000 bank loan. The new company initially focused on specialist computer publications but eventually expanded into other areas such as cycling, music, video games, technology and design, doubling in size every year for seven years. In 1994, Chris moved to the United States where he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine and creator of the popular video game users website IGN. Chris eventually merged Imagine and Future, taking the combined entity public in London in 1999, under the Future name. At its peak, it published 150 magazines and websites and employed 2,000 people.

This success allowed Chris to create a private nonprofit organization, the Sapling Foundation, with the hope of finding new ways to tackle tough global issues through media, technology, entrepreneurship and, most of all, ideas. In 2001, the foundation acquired the TED Conference, then an annual meeting of luminaries in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design held in Monterey, California, and Chris left Future to work full time on TED.

He expanded the conference's remit to cover all topics, including science, business and key global issues, while adding a Fellows program, which now has some 300 alumni, and the TED Prize, which grants its recipients "one wish to change the world." The TED stage has become a place for thinkers and doers from all fields to share their ideas and their work, capturing imaginations, sparking conversation and encouraging discovery along the way.

In 2006, TED experimented with posting some of its talks on the Internet. Their viral success encouraged Chris to begin positioning the organization as a global media initiative devoted to 'ideas worth spreading,' part of a new era of information dissemination using the power of online video. In June 2015, the organization posted its 2,000th talk online. The talks are free to view, and they have been translated into more than 100 languages with the help of volunteers from around the world. Viewership has grown to approximately one billion views per year.

Continuing a strategy of 'radical openness,' in 2009 Chris introduced the TEDx initiative, allowing free licenses to local organizers who wished to organize their own TED-like events. More than 8,000 such events have been held, generating an archive of 60,000 TEDx talks. And three years later, the TED-Ed program was launched, offering free educational videos and tools to students and teachers.

More profile about the speaker
Chris Anderson | Speaker | TED.com
TED2017

Stewart Brand and Chris Anderson: Mammoths resurrected, geoengineering and other thoughts from a futurist

Filmed:
1,163,242 views

Stewart Brand is a futurist, counterculturist and visionary with a very wide-ranging mind. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Brand discusses ... just about everything: human nature, bringing back the wooly mammoth, geoengineering, rewilding and science as organized skepticism -- plus the story of an acid trip on a San Francisco rooftop in the '60s that sparked a perspective-shifting idea. "The story we're told is that we're the next meteor," Brand says, but "things are capable of getting better."
- Environmentalist, futurist
Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ... Full bio - TED Curator
After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

00:12
Chris Anderson: OK, Stewart,
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in the '60s, you -- I think it was '68 --
you founded this magazine.
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Stewart Brand: Bravo!
It's the original one.
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That's hard to find.
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CA: Right. Issue One, right?
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SB: Mm hmm.
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CA: Why did that make so much impact?
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SB: Counterculture was the main event
that I was part of at the time,
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and it was made up
of hippies and New Left.
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That was sort of my contemporaries,
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the people I was just slightly older than.
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And my mode is to look
at where the interesting flow is
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and then look in the other direction.
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CA: (Laughs)
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SB: Partly, I was trained to do that
as an army officer,
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but partly, it's just a cheap heuristic
to find originalities:
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don't look where everybody
else is looking,
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look the opposite way.
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So the deal with counterculture is,
the hippies were very romantic
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and kind of against technology,
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except very good LSD from Sandoz,
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and the New Left was against technology
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because they thought
it was a power device.
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Computers were: do not spindle,
fold, or mutilate.
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Fight that.
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And so, the Whole Earth Catalog
was kind of a counter-counterculture thing
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in the sense that I bought
Buckminster Fuller's idea
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that tools of are of the essence.
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Science and engineers basically
define the world in interesting ways.
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If all the politicians
disappeared one week,
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it would be ... a nuisance.
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But if all the scientists
and engineers disappeared one week,
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it would be way more than a nuisance.
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CA: We still believe that, I think.
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SB: So focus on that.
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And then the New Left was talking
about power to the people.
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And people like Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak
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cut that and just said, power to people,
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tools that actually work.
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And so, where Fuller was saying
don't try to change human nature,
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people have been trying for a long time
and it does not even bend,
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but you can change tools very easily.
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So the efficient thing to do
if you want to make the world better
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is not try to make people behave
differently like the New Left was,
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but just give them tools
that go in the right direction.
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That was the Whole Earth Catalog.
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CA: And Stewart, the central image --
this is one of the first images,
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the first time people had seen
Earth from outer space.
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That had an impact, too.
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SB: It was kind of a chance
that in the spring of '66,
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thanks to an LSD experience
on a rooftop in San Francisco,
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I got thinking about, again,
something that Fuller talked about,
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that a lot of people assume
that the Earth is flat
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and kind of infinite
in terms of its resources,
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but once you really grasp
that it's a sphere
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and that there's only so much of it,
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then you start husbanding your resources
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and thinking about it as a finite system.
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"Spaceship Earth" was his metaphor.
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And I wanted that to be the case,
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but on LSD I was getting higher and higher
on my hundred micrograms
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on the roof of San Francisco,
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and noticed that the downtown buildings
which were right in front of me
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were not all parallel,
they were sort of fanned out like this.
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And that's because
they are on a curved surface.
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And if I were even higher,
I would see that even more clearly,
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higher than that, more clearly still,
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higher enough, and it would close,
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and you would get
the circle of Earth from space.
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And I thought, you know, we've been
in space for 10 years --
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at that time, this is '66 --
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and the cameras had never looked back.
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They'd always been looking out
or looking at just parts of the Earth.
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And so I said, why haven't we seen
a photograph of the whole Earth yet?
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And it went around and NASA got it
and senators, secretaries got it,
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and various people
in the Politburo got it,
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and it went around and around.
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And within two and a half years,
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about the time the Whole Earth
Catalog came out,
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these images started to appear,
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and indeed, they did transform everything.
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And my idea of hacking civilization
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is that you try to do something
lazy and ingenious
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and just sort of trick the situation.
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So all of these photographs
that you see --
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and then the march for science last week,
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they were carrying these
Whole Earth banners and so on --
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I did that with no work.
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I sold those buttons for 25 cents apiece.
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So, you know, tweaking the system
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is, I think, not only the most efficient
way to make the system go
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in interesting ways,
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but in some ways, the safest way,
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because when you try to horse
the whole system around in a big way,
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you can get into big
horsing-around problems,
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but if you tweak it,
it will adjust to the tweak.
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CA: So since then,
among many other things,
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you've been regarded as a leading voice
in the environmental movement,
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but you are also a counterculturalist,
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and recently, you've been
taking on a lot of,
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well, you've been declaring
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what a lot of environmentalists
almost believe are heresies.
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I kind of want to explore
a couple of those.
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I mean, tell me about this image here.
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SB: Ha-ha!
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That's a National Geographic image
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of what is called the mammoth steppe,
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what the far north, the sub-Arctic
and Arctic region, used to look like.
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In fact, the whole world
used to look like that.
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What we find in South Africa
and the Serengeti now,
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lots of big animals,
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was the case in this part of Canada,
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throughout the US, throughout Eurasia,
throughout the world.
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This was the norm
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and can be again.
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So in a sense,
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my long-term goal at this point
is to not only bring back those animals
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and the grassland they made,
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which could be a climate
stabilization system over the long run,
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but even the mammoths
there in the background
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that are part of the story.
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And I think that's probably
a 200-year goal.
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Maybe in 100, by the end of this century,
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we should be able to dial down
the extinction rate
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to sort of what it's been
in the background.
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Bringing back this amount
of bio-abundance will take longer,
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but it's worth doing.
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CA: We'll come back to the mammoths,
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but explain how we
should think of extinctions.
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Obviously, one of the huge
concerns right now
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is that extinction is happening
at a faster rate than ever in history.
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That's the meme that's out there.
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How should we think of it?
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SB: The story that's out there
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is that we're in the middle
of the Sixth Extinction
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or maybe in the beginning
of the Sixth Extinction.
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Because we're in
the de-extinction business,
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the preventing-extinction business
with Revive & Restore,
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we started looking at what's actually
going on with extinction.
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And it turns out, there's a very confused
set of data out there
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which gets oversimplified
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into the narrative of we're becoming ...
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Here are five mass extinctions that are
indicated by the yellow triangles,
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and we're now next.
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The last one there on the far right
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was the meteor that struck
66 million years ago
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and did in the dinosaurs.
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And the story is, we're the next meteor.
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Well, here's the deal.
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I wound up researching this
for a paper I wrote,
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that a mass extinction is when
75 percent of all the species
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in the world go extinct.
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Well, there's on the order
of five-and-a-half-million species,
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of which we've identified
one and a half million.
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Another 14,000 are being
identified every year.
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There's a lot of biology
going on out there.
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Since 1500,
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about 500 species have gone extinct,
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and you'll see the term "mass extinction"
kind of used in strange ways.
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So there was, about a year and a half ago,
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a front-page story by Carl Zimmer
in the New York Times,
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"Mass Extinction in the Oceans,
Broad Studies Show."
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And then you read into the article,
and it mentions that since 1500,
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15 species -- one, five --
have gone extinct in the oceans,
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and, oh, by the way,
none in the last 50 years.
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And you read further
into the story, and it's saying,
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the horrifying thing that's going on
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is that the fisheries
are so overfishing the wild fishes,
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that it is taking down
the fish populations in the oceans
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by 38 percent.
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That's the serious thing.
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None of those species
are probably going to go extinct.
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So you've just put, that headline writer
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put a panic button
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on the top of the story.
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It's clickbait kind of stuff,
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but it's basically saying,
"Oh my God, start panicking,
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we're going to lose
all the species in the oceans."
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Nothing like that is in prospect.
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And in fact, what I then started
looking into in a little more detail,
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the Red List shows about 23,000 species
that are considered threatened
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at one level or another,
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coming from the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN.
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And Nature Magazine had a piece
surveying the loss of wildlife,
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and it said,
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"If all of those 23,000 went extinct
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in the next century or so,
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and that rate of extinction carried on
for more centuries and millennia,
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then we might be at the beginning
of a sixth extinction.
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So the exaggeration is way out of hand.
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But environmentalists always exaggerate.
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That's a problem.
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CA: I mean, they probably feel
a moral responsibility to,
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because they care so much about
the thing that they are looking at,
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and unless you bang the drum for it,
maybe no one listens.
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SB: Every time somebody says
moral this or moral that --
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"moral hazard,"
"precautionary principle" --
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these are terms that are used
to basically say no to things.
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CA: So the problem isn't so much
fish extinction, animal extinction,
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it's fish flourishing, animal flourishing,
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that we're crowding them to some extent?
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SB: Yeah, and I think we are crowding,
and there is losses going on.
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The major losses
are caused by agriculture,
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and so anything that improves agriculture
and basically makes it more condensed,
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more highly productive,
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including GMOs, please,
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but even if you want to do
vertical farms in town,
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including inside farms,
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all the things that have been learned
about how to grow pot in basements,
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is now being applied to growing
vegetables inside containers --
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that's great, that's all good stuff,
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because land sparing is the main thing
we can do for nature.
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People moving to cities is good.
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Making agriculture less
of a destruction of the landscape is good.
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CA: There people talking about
bringing back species, rewilding ...
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Well, first of all, rewilding species:
What's the story with these guys?
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SB: Ha-ha! Wolves.
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Europe, connecting to the previous point,
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we're now at probably peak farmland,
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and, by the way, in terms of population,
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we are already
at peak children being alive.
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Henceforth, there will be
fewer and fewer children.
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We are in the last doubling
of human population,
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and it will get to nine,
maybe nine and a half billion,
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and then start not just leveling off,
but probably going down.
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Likewise, farmland has now peaked,
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and one of the ways
that plays out in Europe
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is there's a lot
of abandoned farmland now,
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which immediately reforests.
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11:26
They don't do wildlife
corridors in Europe.
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They don't need to, because
so many of these farms are connected
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11:32
that they've made
reforested wildlife corridors,
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11:35
that the wolves are coming back,
in this case, to Spain.
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11:38
They've gotten all the way
to the Netherlands.
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11:40
There's bears coming back.
There's lynx coming back.
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11:44
There's the European jackal.
I had no idea such a thing existed.
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11:47
They're coming back from Italy
to the rest of Europe.
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11:50
And unlike here, these are all predators,
which is kind of interesting.
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11:53
They are being welcomed by Europeans.
They've been missed.
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11:57
CA: And counterintuitively,
when you bring back the predators,
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12:00
it actually increases rather than reduces
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12:02
the diversity of the underlying
ecosystem often.
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12:04
SB: Yeah, generally predators
and large animals --
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12:08
large animals and large animals
with sharp teeth and claws --
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12:11
are turning out to be highly important
for a really rich ecosystem.
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12:16
CA: Which maybe brings us to this rather
more dramatic rewilding project
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12:20
that you've got yourself involved in.
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12:22
Why would someone want to bring back
these terrifying woolly mammoths?
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12:25
SB: Hmm. Asian elephants
are the closest relative
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12:28
to the woolly mammoth,
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2293
12:31
and they're about the same size,
genetically very close.
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12:34
They diverged quite recently
in evolutionary history.
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12:38
The Asian elephants
are closer to woolly mammoths
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12:40
than they are to African elephants,
253
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12:42
but they're close enough
to African elephants
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12:44
that they have successfully hybridized.
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12:47
So we're working
with George Church at Harvard,
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12:51
who has already moved the genes
for four major traits
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12:55
from the now well-preserved, well-studied
genome of the woolly mammoth,
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13:01
thanks to so-called
"ancient DNA analysis."
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13:05
And in the lab, he has moved those genes
into living Asian elephant cell lines,
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13:10
where they're taking up
their proper place thanks to CRISPR.
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13:14
I mean, they're not shooting the genes in
like you did with genetic engineering.
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13:18
Now with CRISPR you're editing,
basically, one allele,
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3289
13:21
and replacing it in the place
of another allele.
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13:25
So you're now getting basically
Asian elephant germline cells
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13:31
that are effectively in terms
of the traits that you're going for
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13:35
to be comfortable in the Arctic,
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13:38
you're getting them in there.
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13:40
So we go through the process
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13:41
of getting that through
a surrogate mother,
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13:44
an Asian elephant mother.
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13:46
You can get a proxy, as it's being called
by conservation biologists,
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13:50
of the woolly mammoth,
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13:52
that is effectively a hairy,
curly-trunked, Asian elephant
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5187
13:57
that is perfectly comfortable
in the sub-Arctic.
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14:00
Now, it's the case, so many people say,
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2091
14:02
"Well, how are you going
to get them there?
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2008
14:04
And Asian elephants,
they don't like snow, right?"
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14:07
Well, it turns out, they do like snow.
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1884
14:09
There's some in an Ontario zoo
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1540
14:10
that have made snowballs
bigger than people.
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14:12
They just love -- you know, with a trunk,
you can start a little thing,
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14:16
roll it and make it bigger.
283
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14:18
And then people say,
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14:20
"Yeah, but it's 22 months of gestation.
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3470
14:25
This kind of cross-species cloning
is tricky business, anyway.
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4541
14:30
Are you going to lose some of
the surrogate Asian elephant mothers?"
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3265
14:33
And then George Church
says, "That's all right.
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2203
14:35
We'll do an artificial uterus
and grow them that way."
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2568
14:38
Then people say, "Yeah,
next century, maybe,"
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2270
14:40
except the news came out
this week in Nature
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2254
14:42
that there's now an artificial uterus
in which they've grown a lamb
292
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4323
14:47
to four weeks.
293
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1437
14:48
That's halfway through
its gestation period.
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14:52
So this stuff is moving right along.
295
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14:54
CA: But why should we
want a world where --
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14:57
Picture a world where there are
thousands of these things
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2719
14:59
thundering across Siberia.
298
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1957
15:01
Is that a better world?
299
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1274
15:03
SB: Potentially. It's --
300
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1801
15:04
(Laughter)
301
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1619
15:06
There's three groups, basically,
working on the woolly mammoth seriously:
302
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4995
15:11
Revive & Restore,
we're kind of in the middle;
303
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2286
15:13
George Church and the group at Harvard
that are doing the genetics in the lab;
304
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3691
15:17
and then there's an amazing
old scientist named Zimov
305
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6157
15:23
who works in northern Siberia,
306
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4240
15:28
and his son Nikita,
who has bought into the system,
307
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3124
15:31
and they are, Sergey and Nikita
Zimov have been, for 25 years,
308
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6310
15:37
creating what they call
"Pleistocene Park,"
309
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2407
15:40
which is a place in a really tough part
of Siberia that is pure tundra.
310
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4885
15:45
And the research that's been done shows
311
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2368
15:48
that there's probably one one-hundredth
of the animals on the landscape there
312
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5329
15:53
that there used to be.
313
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1373
15:55
Like that earlier image,
we saw lots of animals.
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15:57
Now there's almost none.
315
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1298
15:59
The tundra is mostly moss,
and then there's the boreal forest.
316
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3549
16:02
And that's the way it is, folks.
There's just a few animals there.
317
950772
3128
16:05
So they brought in
a lot of grazing animals:
318
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2146
16:08
musk ox, Yakutian horses,
they're bringing in some bison,
319
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3105
16:11
they're bringing in some more now,
320
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1788
16:13
and put them in at the density
that they used to be.
321
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3176
16:16
And grasslands are made by grazers.
322
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2992
16:19
So these animals are there, grazing away,
323
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3591
16:22
and they're doing a couple of things.
324
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1856
16:24
First of all, they're turning the tundra,
the moss, back into grassland.
325
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3672
16:28
Grassland fixes carbon.
326
976442
1821
16:30
Tundra, in a warming world, is thawing
and releasing a lot of carbon dioxide
327
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4810
16:35
and also methane.
328
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1699
16:36
So already in their little
25 square miles,
329
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2897
16:39
they're doing a climate
stabilization thing.
330
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2290
16:42
Part of that story, though,
331
990596
2012
16:44
is that the boreal forest is
very absorbent to sunlight,
332
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4869
16:49
even in the winter
when snow is on the ground.
333
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2595
16:52
And the way the mammoth steppe,
334
1000144
1656
16:53
which used to wrap all the way
around the North Pole --
335
1001824
2623
16:56
there's a lot of landmass
around the North Pole --
336
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2388
16:58
that was all this grassland.
337
1006883
2751
17:01
And the steppe was magnificent,
338
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2621
17:04
probably one of the most productive
biomes in the world,
339
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4306
17:08
the biggest biome in the world.
340
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1658
17:11
The forest part of it, right now,
Sergey Zimov and Nikita
341
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4158
17:15
go out with this old military tank
they got for nothing,
342
1023234
3242
17:18
and they knock down the trees.
343
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1748
17:20
And that's a bore, and it's tiresome,
344
1028272
3002
17:23
and as Sergey says,
"... and they make no dung!"
345
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2823
17:26
which, by the way, these big
animals do, including mammoths.
346
1034145
3709
17:29
So mammoths become
what conservation biologists call
347
1037878
2922
17:32
an umbrella species.
348
1040824
1463
17:34
It's an exciting animal --
pandas in China or wherever --
349
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3662
17:37
that the excitement that goes on
of making life good for that animal
350
1045997
4327
17:42
is making a habitat, an ecosystem,
351
1050348
2212
17:44
which is good for a whole lot
of creatures and plants,
352
1052584
2821
17:47
and it ideally gets to the point
of being self-managing,
353
1055429
3294
17:50
where the conservation biologists
can back off and say,
354
1058747
2587
17:53
"All we have to do is keep out
the destructive invasives,
355
1061358
2975
17:56
and this thing can just cook."
356
1064357
1640
17:58
CA: So there's many other species
that you're dreaming of de-extincting
357
1066585
3801
18:02
at some point,
358
1070410
1234
18:03
but I think what I'd actually
like to move on to
359
1071668
3016
18:06
is this idea you talked about
how mammoths might help
360
1074708
3424
18:10
green Siberia in a sense,
361
1078156
2406
18:12
or at least, I'm not talking about
tropical rainforest,
362
1080586
5909
18:18
but this question of greening the planet
you've thought about a lot.
363
1086519
3881
18:22
And the traditional story is
364
1090424
2168
18:24
that deforestation
is one of the most awful curses
365
1092616
6258
18:30
of modern times,
366
1098898
1573
18:32
and that it's a huge contributor
to climate change.
367
1100495
3855
18:36
And then you went and sent me
this graph here, or this map.
368
1104374
3482
18:39
What is this map?
369
1107880
1362
18:41
SB: Global greening.
370
1109266
1408
18:43
The thing to do with any narrative
that you get from headlines
371
1111284
4415
18:47
and from short news stories
372
1115723
1879
18:49
is to look for what else is going on,
373
1117626
1973
18:52
and look for what Marc Andreessen
calls "narrative violation."
374
1120327
4594
18:57
So the narrative -- and Al Gore
is master of putting it out there --
375
1125416
5239
19:02
is that there's this
civilization-threatening
376
1130679
4087
19:06
climate change coming on very rapidly.
377
1134790
2122
19:08
We have to cease all extra production
of greenhouse gases, especially CO2,
378
1136936
6062
19:15
as soon as possible,
379
1143022
1156
19:16
otherwise, we're in deep, deep trouble.
380
1144202
2539
19:18
All of that is true,
but it's not the whole story,
381
1146765
2418
19:21
and the whole story is more interesting
than these fragmentary stories.
382
1149207
3556
19:25
Plants love CO2.
383
1153548
2299
19:28
What plants are made of is CO2
plus water via sunshine.
384
1156330
3890
19:32
And so in many greenhouses,
industrialized greenhouses,
385
1160985
4845
19:37
they add CO2 because the plants
turn that into plant matter.
386
1165854
3266
19:41
So the studies have been done
with satellites and other things,
387
1169144
3030
19:44
and what you're seeing here is a graph of,
over the last 33 years or so,
388
1172198
4072
19:48
there's 14 percent more
leaf action going on.
389
1176294
6164
19:54
There's that much more biomass.
390
1182482
1604
19:56
There's that much more
what ecologists call "primary production."
391
1184110
3142
19:59
There's that much more life happening,
392
1187276
1945
20:01
thanks to climate change,
393
1189245
1296
20:02
thanks to all of our goddam coal plants.
394
1190565
2852
20:05
So -- whoa, what's going on here?
395
1193441
2770
20:08
By the way, crop production
goes up with this.
396
1196235
3615
20:11
This is a partial counter
397
1199874
4278
20:16
to the increase of CO2,
398
1204176
3260
20:19
because there's that much more plant
that is sucking it down
399
1207460
3361
20:22
into plant matter.
400
1210845
1335
20:24
Some of that then decays
and goes right back up,
401
1212204
2298
20:26
but some of it is going down into roots
402
1214526
1942
20:28
and going into the soil and staying there.
403
1216492
2046
20:30
So these counter things are part
of what you need to bear in mind,
404
1218562
3863
20:34
and the deeper story is
405
1222449
1717
20:36
that thinking about and dealing with
and engineering climate
406
1224190
4857
20:41
is a pretty complex process.
407
1229071
2217
20:43
It's like medicine.
408
1231857
1706
20:45
You're always, again,
tweaking around with the system
409
1233587
3220
20:48
to see what makes an improvement.
410
1236831
1976
20:50
Then you do more of that,
see it's still getting better,
411
1238831
2688
20:53
then -- oop! -- that's enough,
back off half a turn.
412
1241543
2457
20:56
CA: But might some people say,
"Not all green is created equal."
413
1244024
3008
20:59
Possibly what we're doing is trading off
the magnificence of the rainforest
414
1247056
3533
21:02
and all that diversity
415
1250613
1152
21:03
for, I don't know, green pond scum
or grass or something like that.
416
1251789
3200
21:07
SB: In this particular study, it turns out
every form of plant is increasing.
417
1255013
3648
21:10
Now, what's interestingly
left out of this study
418
1258685
2254
21:12
is what the hell is going on
in the oceans.
419
1260963
2026
21:15
Primary production in the oceans,
420
1263013
1818
21:16
the biota of the oceans, mostly microbial,
421
1264855
3132
21:20
what they're up to is probably
the most important thing.
422
1268011
2684
21:22
They're the ones
that create the atmosphere
423
1270719
2048
21:24
that we're happily breathing,
424
1272791
1807
21:26
and they're not part of this study.
425
1274622
1821
21:29
This is one of the things
James Lovelock has been insisting;
426
1277051
2906
21:31
basically, our knowledge of the oceans,
especially of ocean life,
427
1279981
3431
21:35
is fundamentally vapor, in this sense.
428
1283436
2127
21:37
So we're in the process of finding out
429
1285587
2040
21:39
by inadvertent bad geoengineering
of too much CO2 in the atmosphere,
430
1287651
5239
21:44
finding out, what is
the ocean doing with that?
431
1292914
2331
21:47
Well, the ocean, with the extra heat,
432
1295269
1898
21:49
is swelling up.
433
1297191
1301
21:50
That's most of where we're getting
the sea level rise,
434
1298516
2538
21:53
and there's a lot more coming
with more global warming.
435
1301078
2632
21:55
We're getting terrible harm
to some of the coral reefs,
436
1303734
4418
22:00
like off of Australia.
437
1308176
1801
22:02
The great reef there is just
a lot of bleaching from overheating.
438
1310509
4309
22:06
And this is why I and Danny Hillis,
in our previous session on the main stage,
439
1314842
6455
22:13
was saying, "Look, geoengineering
is worth experimenting with enough
440
1321321
4366
22:17
to see that it works,
441
1325711
1486
22:19
to see if we can buy time
in the warming aspect of all of this,
442
1327221
4475
22:24
tweak the system with small
but usable research,
443
1332264
4767
22:29
and then see if we should
do more than tweak.
444
1337055
2312
22:32
CA: OK, so this is what
we're going to talk about
445
1340119
2393
22:34
for the last few minutes here
446
1342536
1435
22:35
because it's such an important discussion.
447
1343995
2046
22:38
First of all, this book
was just published by Yuval Harari.
448
1346065
3745
22:41
He's basically saying the next evolution
of humans is to become as gods.
449
1349834
4145
22:46
I think he --
450
1354003
1151
22:47
SB: Now, you've talked to him.
And you've probably finished the book.
451
1355178
3312
22:50
I haven't finished it yet.
452
1358514
1286
22:51
Where does he come out on --
453
1359824
1462
22:53
CA: I mean, it's a pretty radical view.
454
1361310
4162
22:57
He thinks that we will
completely remake ourselves
455
1365496
3424
23:00
using data, using bioengineering,
456
1368944
3475
23:04
to become completely new creatures
457
1372443
2140
23:06
that have, kind of, superpowers,
458
1374607
2026
23:08
and that there will be huge inequality.
459
1376657
3232
23:11
But we're about to write a very radical,
brand-new chapter of history.
460
1379913
5273
23:17
That's what he believes.
461
1385210
1572
23:18
SB: Is he nervous about that? I forget.
462
1386806
1943
23:20
CA: He's nervous about it,
463
1388773
2441
23:23
but I think he also
likes provoking people.
464
1391238
2892
23:26
SB: Are you nervous about that?
465
1394154
1985
23:28
CA: I'm nervous about that.
466
1396163
1418
23:29
But, you know, with so much at TED,
I'm excited and nervous.
467
1397605
4065
23:33
And the optimist in me
is trying hard to lean towards
468
1401694
3756
23:37
"This is awesome and really exciting,"
469
1405474
2088
23:39
while the sort of responsible
part of me is saying,
470
1407586
2439
23:42
"But, uh, maybe we should
be a little bit careful
471
1410049
2339
23:44
as to how we think of it."
472
1412412
1323
23:45
SB: That's your secret sauce,
isn't it, for TED?
473
1413759
2372
23:48
Staying nervous and excited.
474
1416155
1576
23:50
CA: It's also the recipe for being
a little bit schizophrenic.
475
1418910
3188
23:54
But he didn't quote you.
476
1422122
4685
23:58
What I thought was an astonishing
statement that you made
477
1426831
2740
24:01
right back in the original
Whole Earth Catalog,
478
1429595
4253
24:05
you ended it with this powerful phrase:
479
1433872
3200
24:09
"We are as gods,
and might as well get good at it."
480
1437096
3441
24:12
And then more recently,
you've upgraded that statement.
481
1440561
2672
24:15
I want you talk about this philosophy.
482
1443257
1824
24:17
SB: Well, one of the things I'm learning
is that documentation
483
1445105
3615
24:20
is better than memory -- by far.
484
1448744
2992
24:23
And one of the things I've learned
from somebody --
485
1451760
2965
24:26
I actually got on Twitter.
486
1454749
2655
24:29
It changed my life --
it hasn't forgiven me yet!
487
1457428
3700
24:33
And I took ownership of this phrase
when somebody quoted it,
488
1461152
4002
24:37
and somebody else said,
489
1465178
1556
24:38
"Oh by the way, that isn't
what you originally wrote
490
1466758
2463
24:41
in that first 1968 Whole Earth Catalog.
491
1469245
2767
24:44
You wrote, 'We are as gods
and might as well get used to it.'"
492
1472036
3068
24:47
I'd forgotten that entirely.
493
1475128
2261
24:49
The stories -- these goddam stories --
the stories we tell ourselves
494
1477413
3363
24:52
become lies over time.
495
1480800
1816
24:55
So, documentation helps cut through that.
496
1483076
2793
24:57
It did move on to "We are as gods
and might as well get good at it,"
497
1485893
3239
25:01
and that was the Whole Earth Catalog.
498
1489156
1885
25:03
By the time I was doing a book
called "Whole Earth Discipline:
499
1491065
3064
25:06
An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,"
500
1494153
2366
25:08
and in light of climate change,
basically saying that we are as gods
501
1496543
3192
25:11
and have to get good at it.
502
1499759
1599
25:13
CA: We are as gods
and have to get good at it.
503
1501382
2264
25:15
So talk about that, because
the psychological reaction
504
1503670
3559
25:19
from so many people as soon
as you talk about geoengineering
505
1507253
3154
25:22
is that the last thing they believe
is that humans should be gods --
506
1510431
3261
25:25
some of them for religious reasons,
507
1513716
1884
25:27
but most just for humility reasons,
508
1515624
2921
25:30
that the systems are too complex,
509
1518569
1621
25:32
we should not be dabbling that way.
510
1520214
2659
25:35
SB: Well, this is the Greek
narrative about hubris.
511
1523642
3939
25:39
And once you start getting
really sure of yourself,
512
1527605
3267
25:42
you wind up sleeping with your mother.
513
1530896
2657
25:45
(Laughter)
514
1533577
2618
25:48
CA: I did not expect you would say that.
515
1536219
2001
25:50
(Laughter)
516
1538244
1667
25:53
SB: That's the Oedipus story.
517
1541600
2588
25:56
Hubris is a really important
cautionary tale to always have at hand.
518
1544212
5354
26:03
One of the guidelines
I've kept for myself is:
519
1551734
3782
26:07
every day I ask myself how many things
I am dead wrong about.
520
1555540
4519
26:13
And I'm a scientist by training
521
1561393
3089
26:16
and getting to work
with scientists these days,
522
1564506
2319
26:18
which is pure joy.
523
1566849
1247
26:20
Science is organized skepticism.
524
1568120
3072
26:24
So you're always insisting
525
1572042
3536
26:27
that even when something
looks pretty good,
526
1575602
3399
26:31
you maintain a full set
of not only suspicions
527
1579850
3362
26:35
about whether it's as good as it looks,
528
1583236
2095
26:37
but: What else is going on?
529
1585355
1597
26:38
So this "What else is going?" on query,
530
1586976
3322
26:42
I think, is how you get
away from fake news.
531
1590322
4103
26:46
It's not necessarily real news,
532
1594449
2504
26:50
but it's welcomely more complex news
533
1598274
4049
26:54
that you're trying to take on.
534
1602347
1537
26:55
CA: But coming back to the application
of this just for the environment:
535
1603908
3461
26:59
it seems like the philosophy of this
is that, whether we like it or not,
536
1607393
3440
27:02
we are already dominating so many aspects
of what happens on planets,
537
1610857
3443
27:06
and we're doing it unintentionally,
538
1614324
1692
27:08
so we really should start
doing it intentionally.
539
1616040
4381
27:12
What would it look like to start
getting good at being a god?
540
1620445
3983
27:16
How should we start doing that?
541
1624452
2020
27:18
Are there small-scale experiments
or systems we can nudge and play with?
542
1626496
3896
27:22
How on earth do we think about it?
543
1630416
1959
27:24
SB: The mentor that sort of freed me
544
1632399
1803
27:26
from total allegiance
to Buckminster Fuller
545
1634226
2280
27:28
was Gregory Bateson.
546
1636530
1776
27:30
And Gregory Bateson was an epistemologist
and anthropologist and biologist
547
1638857
6522
27:37
and psychologist and many other things,
548
1645403
1889
27:39
and he looked at how systems
basically look at themselves.
549
1647316
5099
27:44
And that is, I think, part of how
you want to always be looking at things.
550
1652439
5515
27:49
And what I like about David Keith's
approach to geoengineering
551
1657978
3528
27:53
is you don't just haul off and do it.
552
1661530
1885
27:56
David Keith's approach --
553
1664093
1287
27:57
and this is what Danny Hillis
was talking about earlier --
554
1665404
3097
28:00
is that you do it really,
really incrementally,
555
1668525
2445
28:02
you do some stuff to tweak the system,
see how it responds,
556
1670994
3869
28:06
that tells you something about the system.
557
1674887
2021
28:08
That's responding to the fact
that people say, quite rightly,
558
1676932
4413
28:13
"What are we talking about here?
559
1681369
1589
28:14
We don't understand
how the climate system works.
560
1682982
2377
28:17
You can't engineer a system
you don't understand."
561
1685383
2671
28:20
And David says, "Well, that certainly
applies to the human body,
562
1688569
3183
28:23
and yet medicine goes ahead,
and we're kind of glad that it has."
563
1691776
3782
28:27
The way you engineer a system
that is so large and complex
564
1695582
4013
28:31
that you can't completely understand it
565
1699619
2020
28:33
is you tweak it,
566
1701663
1194
28:34
and this is kind of
an anti-hubristic approach.
567
1702881
2601
28:37
This is: try a little bit here,
568
1705506
1917
28:39
back the hell off if it's an issue,
569
1707447
2104
28:41
expand it if it seems to go OK,
570
1709575
1807
28:43
meanwhile, have other paths going forward.
571
1711406
2002
28:45
This is the whole argument for diversity
and dialogue and all these other things
572
1713432
4083
28:49
and the things we were hearing
about earlier with Sebastian [Thrun].
573
1717539
3235
28:53
So the non-hubristic approach
is looking for social license,
574
1721393
6490
28:59
which is a terminology
that I think is a good one,
575
1727907
2541
29:02
of including society enough
576
1730472
2147
29:04
in these interesting,
problematic, deep issues
577
1732643
4001
29:08
that they get to have a pretty good idea
578
1736668
3820
29:12
and have people that they trust
paying close attention
579
1740512
2791
29:15
to the sequence of experiments
as it's going forward,
580
1743327
3824
29:19
the public dialogue
as it's going forward --
581
1747175
3019
29:22
which is more public than ever,
which is fantastic --
582
1750218
3095
29:25
and you feel your way,
583
1753337
2425
29:28
you just ooze your way along,
584
1756653
1683
29:30
and this is the muddle-through approach
that has worked pretty well so far.
585
1758360
4610
29:34
The reason that Sebastian
and I are optimistic is we read
586
1762994
3609
29:38
people like Steven Pinker,
"The Better Angels of Our Nature,"
587
1766627
3473
29:42
and so far, so good.
588
1770124
2541
29:45
Now, that can always change,
589
1773078
3101
29:48
but you can build a lot on that sense
of: things are capable of getting better,
590
1776203
5615
29:54
figure out the tools that made
that happen and apply those further.
591
1782587
3201
29:57
That's the story.
592
1785812
1639
29:59
CA: Stewart, I think
on that optimistic note,
593
1787475
2305
30:01
we're actually going to wrap up.
594
1789804
1662
30:03
I am in awe of how you always
are willing to challenge yourself
595
1791490
5117
30:08
and other people.
596
1796631
1355
30:10
I feel like this recipe for never
allowing yourself to be too certain
597
1798010
5781
30:15
is so powerful.
598
1803815
1403
30:17
I want to learn it more for myself,
599
1805242
1931
30:19
and it's been very insightful
and inspiring, actually,
600
1807197
4077
30:23
listening to you today.
601
1811298
1181
30:24
Stewart Brand, thank you so much.
602
1812503
1601
30:26
SB: Thank you.
603
1814128
1158
30:27
(Applause)
604
1815310
3119

▲Back to top

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Stewart Brand - Environmentalist, futurist
Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ...

Why you should listen

With biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, the revival of extinct species is becoming possible. Stewart Brand plans to not only bring species back but restore them to the wild.

Brand is already a legend in the tech industry for things he’s created: the Whole Earth Catalog, The WELL, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation, and the notion that “information wants to be free.” Now Brand, a lifelong environmentalist, wants to re-create -- or “de-extinct” -- a few animals that’ve disappeared from the planet.

Granted, resurrecting the woolly mammoth using ancient DNA may sound like mad science. But Brand’s Revive and Restore project has an entirely rational goal: to learn what causes extinctions so we can protect currently endangered species, preserve genetic and biological diversity, repair depleted ecosystems, and essentially “undo harm that humans have caused in the past.”

More profile about the speaker
Stewart Brand | Speaker | TED.com
Chris Anderson - TED Curator
After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

Why you should listen

Chris Anderson is the Curator of TED, a nonprofit devoted to sharing valuable ideas, primarily through the medium of 'TED Talks' -- short talks that are offered free online to a global audience.

Chris was born in a remote village in Pakistan in 1957. He spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his parents worked as medical missionaries, and he attended an American school in the Himalayas for his early education. After boarding school in Bath, England, he went on to Oxford University, graduating in 1978 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

Chris then trained as a journalist, working in newspapers and radio, including two years producing a world news service in the Seychelles Islands.

Back in the UK in 1984, Chris was captivated by the personal computer revolution and became an editor at one of the UK's early computer magazines. A year later he founded Future Publishing with a $25,000 bank loan. The new company initially focused on specialist computer publications but eventually expanded into other areas such as cycling, music, video games, technology and design, doubling in size every year for seven years. In 1994, Chris moved to the United States where he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine and creator of the popular video game users website IGN. Chris eventually merged Imagine and Future, taking the combined entity public in London in 1999, under the Future name. At its peak, it published 150 magazines and websites and employed 2,000 people.

This success allowed Chris to create a private nonprofit organization, the Sapling Foundation, with the hope of finding new ways to tackle tough global issues through media, technology, entrepreneurship and, most of all, ideas. In 2001, the foundation acquired the TED Conference, then an annual meeting of luminaries in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design held in Monterey, California, and Chris left Future to work full time on TED.

He expanded the conference's remit to cover all topics, including science, business and key global issues, while adding a Fellows program, which now has some 300 alumni, and the TED Prize, which grants its recipients "one wish to change the world." The TED stage has become a place for thinkers and doers from all fields to share their ideas and their work, capturing imaginations, sparking conversation and encouraging discovery along the way.

In 2006, TED experimented with posting some of its talks on the Internet. Their viral success encouraged Chris to begin positioning the organization as a global media initiative devoted to 'ideas worth spreading,' part of a new era of information dissemination using the power of online video. In June 2015, the organization posted its 2,000th talk online. The talks are free to view, and they have been translated into more than 100 languages with the help of volunteers from around the world. Viewership has grown to approximately one billion views per year.

Continuing a strategy of 'radical openness,' in 2009 Chris introduced the TEDx initiative, allowing free licenses to local organizers who wished to organize their own TED-like events. More than 8,000 such events have been held, generating an archive of 60,000 TEDx talks. And three years later, the TED-Ed program was launched, offering free educational videos and tools to students and teachers.

More profile about the speaker
Chris Anderson | Speaker | TED.com