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“On average in advanced societies, about 70% of freshwater that’s consumed is consumed by agriculture. In less developed countries, sometimes as high as 95% of the freshwater goes to agriculture, which means that you’re depleting the amount of water available for the environment. You’re depleting amount of groundwater to preserve for the future, especially in dry times, and it creates a stress for...

Seth is a lawyer, activist, entrepreneur, public speaker and New York Times Bestselling Author. He is an expert in water management and conservation. His first book Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World talks about how a government in one of the driest regions in the world revolutionised water managed. His second book Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink , pres...

"Our starting point was that a lot of the stories we tell about futures world are quite poor. It’s not stories that are meeting the world as it is now. It’s difficult for people to inhabit the kinds of worlds that we imagine through scenarios or modelling, so there is a kind of distance between where we are now and the life worlds of a decarbonized or a post-fossil world." Harriet Bulkeley is Prof...

Harriet Bulkeley is Professor at Durham University, UK and Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research is concerned with the politics and governance of environmental issues, with a particular interest in climate change, energy, nature and urban sustainability. She is currently working on how nature-based solutions are coming to occupy a place in the political landscape of environmental gover...

Spatial analyst specialist Carlos Souza Jr. is a senior research associate at the Institute of People and the Environment of the Amazon, otherwise known as Imazon. He’s also a technical and scientific coordinator for MapBiomas, a collaborative network of co-creators, NGOs, universities, and technology companies, among others. He received his Ph. D. in Geography at University of California in Santa...

“Find a balance. Use technology. And connect with nature. I think that’s really critical. There is big hope for your generation because you have better environmental education. I can see this. You are more aware of these issues. In terms of the environmental issues that we face now, we need to connect more with nature, to open up your heart for that. You have this amazing opportunity to reach out...

"The term Rights of Nature tends to be applied to two different things. One is this underlying legal philosophy that is actually broader than just Rights of Nature, that’s probably better understood as ecological jurisprudence that may or may not be expressed in terms of rights, but because Rights of Nature is getting a lot of attention that term tends to be applied to represent this broader under...

Craig Kauffman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon and a member of the United Nations Knowledge Network on Harmony with Nature. He has authored numerous works on environmental politics, ecological law, and sustainable development, including The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future , MIT Press, 2021 (with Pamela Martin)....

“I think the next crisis is going to be a materials crisis. The whole point of moving from a zero-sum game–like who makes the best cheapest product at the lowest price and can find lowest labor somewhere around the world so someone can be happy with a new laundry machine and buy another one in five years–that’s not going to work for us.” Tiemen ter Hoeven is founder and CEO of Roetz, a manufacture...

Tiemen ter Hoeven is founder and CEO of Roetz, a manufacturer of circular bicycles and e-bikes. In the Netherlands alone, about 1 million bicycles are discarded every year - whilst many parts can still be used perfectly well. In the Roetz Fair Factory, the parts are cleaned, repaired, and reassembled into new bicycles by people with poor job prospects. Roetz’ mission is to bring circular design an...

“I think the environmental community has been guilty of a lot of catastrophism, a lot of statements like ‘Game Over for the Planet’, and we’ve painted a lot of very dark pictures about where we’re going, but when you look across these different sectors and all the solutions that are out there, there’s no reason to believe that our grandchildren couldn’t live in an incredibly exciting world.” Samue...

Samuel Myers, MD, MPH studies the human health impacts of accelerating disruptions to Earth’s natural systems.  He is a Principal Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is the founding Director of the Planetary Health Alliance.  Sam’s current work spans several areas of planetary health including global nutritional impacts of CO2, health impacts of land m...

“A key part of how I go about doing my research is being involved in policy discussions, policy conversations, and also by following the international climate negotiations very closely. Actually, I started my research career as a part of the Presidency of the International Climate Negotiations in 2009. After that I remained an advisor to country delegations in the international negotiations, parti...

“We’re coming out of one of the worst times for resource exploitation, waste and everything related to that waste of resources, so trying to set the example, especially for my kids, recycling, trying to be reasonable about purchasing things, about where things end up after you’re done using them, just in general being careful about what you do, what impacts there are down the line. Even for them a...

Dr. Joeri Rogelj is Director of Research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College and also at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He studies how societies transform towards more sustainable futures, connecting Earth sciences to policy. He publishes on 1.5°C pathways, UN climate agreements, carbon budgets and net zero targets. He is a long-serving author on authoritative...

Born and raised in Haiti, Jean Weiner has worked on coastal and marine since 1991.  In 1992, Jean founded Haiti’s first coastal and marine environmental non-profit the Foundation for the Protection of Marine Biodiversity. He is the head of the organization today and he specializes in coastal and marine sciences, environmental monitoring and management, and community development, and has execu...

Rob Pringle is a professor of ecology, biodiversity, and conservation at Princeton University. He’s fascinated by nearly all facets of ecology and conservation and his research in his lab addresses a correspondingly broad sweep of questions. His work on these questions is motivated by curiosity. The questions are united by a single goal: to understand how wild ecosystems work by studying their mod...

“For nature and natural beauty to survive, people have to want it. If they don’t ever experience it, why should they want it? What could you see of value in it, something that you not only have never experienced but don’t ever expect to. We intellectually know that the Amazon is an important thing because it stores carbon and it’s home to many species, but I’ve been there. That’s a different thing...

“I do want to point out–many writers don’t want to admit to it or say it–it’s just words on a page until everybody else makes it come alive. You had Idris Elba and Wood Harris acting in that scene. I had Joe Chappelle shooting it. He was the director. All the craftsmen and artists that worked on that made it what it is. And that’s actually what I like about it. It’s why I continue to work in telev...

George Pelecanos is an award-winning author, essayist, screenwriter and producer from Washington, D.C. He has written over 20 novels and four series in the crime and detective fiction genre. He is also a recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book prize, the Raymond Chandler award, the Hammett Prize, the Barry Award, the Gumshoe Award, and the Grand Prix Du Roman Noir award. Pelecanos worked as a scre...

"I have a strong feeling that at the moment, especially in the United States, people are much more interested in the culture and backgrounds of minorities than they are in the cultures where those minorities originally came from. I think it’s a sign of people drawing inwards more and more. That goes for the Right Wing populists and White Supremacists just as much. They’re also drawing the wagons a...

Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance , The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land , Year Zero , The China Lover , Murder in Amsterdam , Occidentalism and God’s Dust . He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker , The New York Times , and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an esp...

“The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for...

Brian Wilcox is the chief engineer and co-founder of Marine BioEnergy, Inc.   Marine BioEnergy was founded to grow plants in the open ocean to provide carbon-neutral fuels so that eventually fossil fuel use can be eliminated. Previously, Brian spent 38 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on robots for planetary exploration and other extreme environments. At NASA, he was the Supervi...

“The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now domina...